I'm a bit pressed for time, but wanted to offer a brief post calling readers' attention to a US Supreme Court case that came down today -- Lozano v. Montoya Alvarez. In it, a unanimous Court interprets the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction to not allow equitable tolling of the requirement that a child be automatically...
[Charles Blanchard served as General Counsel of the U.S. Air Force from 2009-2013, and General Counsel of the Army from1999-2001, is currently a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP. He was a panelist at a Chatham House conference on autonomous weapons.] In the past year, proposals for an autonomous weapons ban have gone from a fringe notion to an agenda item for the Convention on...
[Expanding and moving this up from the comments section of my previous post.] In a comment to the previous post, reader "Non liquet" noted that: The UN Security Council Meeting was interesting in this regard today. Reportedly, the Russian Ambassador to the UN stated he received a letter from the former President of Ukraine dated 1 March requesting intervention of the Russian...
I agree with Peter that the mere breach of the international law governing the use of force does not mean that all international law is useless and meaningless. But I don't think Eric Posner's pithy challenge to the international law academy on Ukraine can be so easily dismissed. International lawyers need, especially in this area, to provide a meaningful theory...
Saturday began with reports that Russia had seemingly used private security contractors to take control of the airport in Simferopol, Crimea. Then reports (like this one from CNN) of President Putin requesting from Russia’s Parliament an authorization to use military force in Ukraine because of “threats to the lives of Russian citizens and Russian military personnel based in the southern...
Lots of reports, including those from the new Ukrainian government at a meeting of the UN Security Council, suggest that Russian military forces have crossed into Ukraine. This has caused a mild panic on Wall Street and some typically overwrought press reporting from, just to give an example, Britain's Daily Mail. A treaty signed in 1994 by the US and Britain...
Reprieve, the excellent British human-rights organisation, has submitted a communication to the ICC asking it to investigate NATO personnel involved in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Here is Reprieve's press release: Drone victims are today lodging a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing NATO member states of war crimes over their role in facilitating the US’s covert drone programme in Pakistan. It...
The recent altercation between members of Pussy Riot and Cossack militia that was caught on video is a red flag signalling a broader issue in the Russian Federation: the resurgent power of the Cossacks and their relation to the Russian state, especially to keep politically-disfavored groups in check. But who are the Cossacks? A paramilitary organization? A political party? An ethnic...
The BBC is reporting that dozens of people have died today in new fighting between police and protestors in Ukraine. For a background to what is underlying the protests, see these posts concerning the struggle over the norms that will define Ukraine, how Ukraine's domestic disputes interact with Russian and European regional strategies, and the significance of the eastward spread...
Eugene has graciously responded to my earlier post; you can find his new post here. It's well worth a read. I just want to offer a few thoughts on Eugene's response, because I think it fails to address the core of my critique: that it is incorrect to claim, as Eugene did in his first post, that Europe's opposition to the...
I'm currently in Belgium, teaching an intensive course on international criminal law at Katholieke University Leuven. So I was struck by Eugene Kontorovich's most recent post at the Volokh Conspiracy, in which he uses a new Belgian law permitting euthanasia for minors to criticize the Supreme Court's abolition of the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons. Here is the crux of...
Fresh from its victory in Sainovic, the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has now asked the Appeals Chamber to reconsider its final judgment in Perisic on the ground that it would be unjust to permit Perisic to remain acquitted. As the legal basis for such reconsideration 11 months after final judgment, the OTP cites...
