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31 Aug

As the military situation in eastern Ukraine become more violent with the incursion of Russian troops, Vladimir Putin has called for talks to determine the statehood of eastern Ukraine. The Interpreter, a website that translates and analyzes Russian media reports, states that in an interview on Russian television Putin said: We must immediately get down to a substantial, substantive negotiations, and...

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27 Aug

The New York Times is running a big report today on the U.S. plan to sign a "sweeping" climate change agreement without having to go to Congress for approval or ratification.  Instead of a typical treaty requiring ratification by the Senate, the U.S. has a different more creative strategy. American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal...

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27 Aug

On the record, US officials invariably defend even the most indefensible IDF uses of force in Gaza, most often parroting the Israeli line that the IDF does everything it can to spare civilian lives and that Hamas's use of human shields is responsible for any innocent civilians the IDF does kill. When speaking anonymously, however, those same officials tell a very different...

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21 Aug

Reasonable people can disagree about the legal merits of U.S. court judgments against Argentina requiring it to pay holdout creditor hedge funds. But I can’t say the same about Argentina’s recently announced claim against the United States at the International Court of Justice. Based on Argentina’s own description of its legal arguments, I stand by my earlier assessment: Argentina’s international...

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09 Aug

Kirsty Brimelow QC, the chair of the Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC) -- and a colleague of mine at Doughty Street Chambers -- has responded to my position on the 2009 Declaration, as recounted by Joshua Rozenberg in this Guardian article. Here is the relevant paragraph: Neither Rozenberg's opinion piece nor academic he relies upon, Kevin Heller, cite the text of the 2012 decision in support...

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05 Aug

The ICC Office of the Prosecutor has just released the following statement: Palestine is not a State Party to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC; neither has the Court received any official document from Palestine indicating acceptance of ICC jurisdiction or requesting the Prosecutor to open an investigation into any alleged crimes following the November 2012 United Nations...

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05 Aug

The request is supported by a number of leading QCs and professors in Britain. (Full disclosure: three of the signatories are barrister members and one is an academic member of Doughty Street Chambers, with which I'm associated.) Here is the Bar Human Rights Committee's summary: Public international law and criminal law Q.C.s and Professors based in Britain join with the Bar Human...

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04 Aug

As Eugene notes in today's guest post, the Palestinian Authority (PA) appears to have decided to ratify the Rome Statute. I'll believe it when I see it: the PA has threatened to ratify before, only to back down at the last moment. But could it? Most observers have assumed it could, but Eugene disagrees. I think his bottom line may well be...

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28 Jul

A few hours ago, the NY Times broke a story that the United States views Russian tests of a ground-launched missile as violating the 1987 INF treaty, formally (and lengthily) titled, "The Treaty Between The United States Of America And The Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics On The Elimination Of Their Intermediate-Range And Shorter-Range Missiles".  According to the story, the State...

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26 Jul

That's the question at the heart of a complicated debate between a variety of IHL scholars. The debate began with a legal opinion that Avi Bell submitted to the Knesset, in which he argued that nothing in international law prohibits Israel from cutting off the water and power it provides to Gaza. Although the opinion is dense -- and has been updated...

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