A couple of weeks ago a group of Opinio Juris bloggers held a round-table discussion at St. John’s University Law School about the international law and policy issues facing the next American President. In front of a full room, we considered issues ranging from relations with China and Russia, to the future of national security policy, human rights, international trade...
As regular readers of this blog probably guessed, I did not support Donald Trump for President (I didn’t support Hillary Clinton either, but that’s another story). I did, however, take the possibility of his election seriously and published a couple of posts (see this one here) analyzing the legal issues raised by his campaign promises to withdraw from existing U.S....
Those of us here in the US are pretty obsessed with tomorrow's U.S. presidential election (and from what I can tell, those of you outside the States are pretty interested as well). International law has not been a huge issue in the election, but I do think tomorrow's result could have at least three big impacts on the international legal system. Trumpxit As I...
Urbanization is our present and it is our future. Between the recently completed UN Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, and Iraqi Special Operations entering Mosul, starting what may be a complex urban battle, we face constant reminders that much of the world’s population now lives in cities. How we protect rights, foster development, interact with the environment, organize politically,...
Early in my international law education here in the U.S, I learned that dualism was an unfortunate concept that led to the U.S. violating international law obligations by failing to enforce those obligations (usually treaties) domestically. But today's blockbuster decision from a UK court in Miller v. Secretary of State on Brexit should remind us that dualism can also work to...
The inimitable David Bosco dropped quite the bombshell yesterday at FP.com: The Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC intends to open a formal investigation into the situation in Afghanistan -- a situation that includes, as the OTP discussed in its most recent preliminary-examination report, US torture of detainees between 2003 and 2005. I'll have more to say about the...
[Christine Schwobel-Patel is Senior Lecturer and co-Director of the Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law research cluster at the University of Liverpool.] The International Criminal Court in The Hague, has been making the headlines in quick succession. In September it became evident that it is changing course, moving away from (protracted and politically sensitive) trials of heads of state and rebel...
[Marina Lostal is a Lecturer in International Law at The Hague University of Applied Sciences.] On 27 September 2016, the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court) entered a conviction and sentence that marked several firsts in the history of the Court. It found the Accused - Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, guilty of the war crime of intentionally directing attacks...
[Steven Ratner is the Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.] Ecuador’s announcement that it had severed Julian Assange’s internet connection in its London Embassy can be seen as a cynical manipulation of international law or a principled stance in favor of an important rule. Recall that Assange has been holed up in the embassy since...
I want to call readers' attention to Oxford University Press's publication of my friend Kim Priemel's new book, The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence. Here is the publisher's description: At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity'...
[Mariam Kizilbash read for her LLM in Public International Law from UCL, has worked as a legal officer with charities in London and Islamabad on areas such as death-row offences, US drone strikes and large-scale corporate corruption. She now works now as a freelance writer.] An Englishman of Bangladeshi origin, an Irishman, two Scotsmen resident in France, a Welshman and and a Gibraltarian, whose wife...
[Boyd van Dijk is a doctoral candidate at the European University Institute and a GTA at the War Studies Department of King’s College, London. He holds degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University. He is currently working on a new international history of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. His first post can be...
