In the wake of the murder of al-Arabiya correspondent Atwar Bahjat and two of her colleagues, a journalist asked President Jalal Talabani to permit journalists working in Iraq to carry weapons in self-defense. "Send me an official request and I will approve it and inform concerned agencies to give you the right to carry arms," President Talabani replied.The exchange...
Sarah Cleveland has just published a very significant article in the Yale Journal of International Law entitled "Our International Constitution." Cleveland is a great writer and her article is a pleasure to read, even though I sharply differ with her on the appropriateness of using international law to interpret constitutional guarantees (see my articles here, here and here).Cleveland is...
The following is a quick summary of the ICC's work to date, courtesy of the International Justice Tribune:Since its creation in July 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has received 1,732 pieces of communication about crimes committed in 139 countries. According to the second summary published by the office of the prosecutor on February 10, 60% of the information came...
The new African Court of Human and People's Rights, which was established as Africa's new regional international court, will sit in Arusha, Tanzania. This is not exactly a surprise. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda already sits there and its mandate will expire in 2008, so it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of the existing...
The U.S. government has announced that it will oppose the current proposal for a new Human Rights Council to take the place of the much-derided U.N. Commission on Human Rights. (The new proposal is here.) Although the U.S. has been pushing for a new Council, it is not happy with the current proposal, which would not guarantee the exclusion...
Following up on my earlier posts about Saddam and Serbia:Prosecutors at Saddam's trial introduced two important documents yesterday. The first is a memo from the Revolutionary Court, dated June 14, 1984, listing the names of 148 suspects that had been sentenced to death by hanging. The chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Moussawi, said the signature on the memo was that of...
In what could turn out to be a very important ruling, a Nigerian court in Port Harcourt has ordered Royal Dutch Shell to pay $1.5 billion for the environmental damage its oil-refining activities have caused in the southern Niger delta region. CorpWatch:Local residents began to experience health problems soon after Shell Oil company injected a million litres of a...
My vote for the most important international law case of the month is Shell v. Ijaw Aborigines of Bayelsa State. The Federal High Court in Port Harcourt, Nigeria rendered its $1.5 billion dollar judgment against Shell on February 24, 2006. I have searched in vain for the text of the decision and will update the post once it becomes available....
This Friday, March 3, 2006, St. John’s Law School will host a conference entitled Federalism Past, Federalism Future: A Constitutional Law Symposium. The full brochure is available here and the symposium papers will be published this spring in a 20th anniversary issue of the St. John’s Journal of Legal Commentary.The Conference will have well-known Constitutional Law luminaries, such as Akhil...
Professor Curtis Bradley has put together a terrific conference at Duke Law School this week on Delegating Sovereignty. The presenters are leading law school and political science scholars. This is a topic that pops up in many contexts, including my own personal obsession with the ICJ (see my articles on the subject here and here) but also in many other...
The U.S. and Colombian governments have announced they have reached a bilateral free trade agreement. The USTR's announcement can be found here and a pdf summary of the agreement can be found here.As the NYT points out, a U.S-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will be the largest U.S. free trade agreement in the Western Hemisphere south of Mexico. Moreover, with...
Today, the ICJ opened public hearings in the long-anticipated case between Bosnia and Serbia over Serbia's alleged responsibility for genocide during the 1993-1999 Balkan wars. The ICJ has decided to make everything public and web-accessible. Hence, the opening argument of Bosnia's counsel is already available here. This case has a long and torturous procedural history. It was...
