In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Featured

24 Nov

[Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is on Twitter at @peiresc.] During the absorbing litigation that led to the death of Alien Tort Statute litigation a couple of years ago, one of the most fascinating moments occurred late, and it has not been mentioned since. In the Second Circuit phase of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Judge José Cabranes had contended that the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg proved there was no norm in customary international law of corporate civil liability. If so, he had asked, how could he find for the plaintiffs? In response, a bevy of renowned historians filed an amicus brief on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, contending that the reason Judge Cabranes had failed to find civil liability was because the Allies had been willing to destroy the corporations that participated in Nazi evil. The greater included the lesser: if they could go that far, would they really have rejected civil liability for corporate atrocities? Then another group of historians, including Jonathan Bush, filed an amicus brief not so ardently focused on serving the human rights movement (though not opposing it either). No longer indentured to the instrumental if understandable project of reading the past for present ends, these historians revealed that our ancestors were more ambitious than we are. In their treatment of corporations, Bush and his colleagues said, the Allies hadn’t really been interested in atrocities anyway, or merely aimed at the low bar of sanctioning them. Rather, Nuremberg lawyers had been New Dealers; they had thought a lot about corporations, especially in the antitrust context; and it was this thinking that motivated them to break up (not destroy) I.G. Farben and take the other steps they did. More generally, an attitude of politically organizing business properly to avoid aggressive war mostly prevailed, not atrocity consciousness for the sake of victims seeking compensation. It was one of those things that seemed self-evident as soon as the historians said it, even if the insight got lost in the shuffle of the litigation, with its necessarily opportunistic attitude toward the past. Yet the prospect that opened in the midst of the litigation wasn’t merely self-evident, it was exciting. In the old days, corporations were regulated in the name of a theory of the healthy role they could and must play in a democracy. They were not simply unbound — as they have been since the conservative legal movement set the terms of corporate law nationally and internationally — and then at most taxed after the fact when they went awry. Granted, the corpse of ATS may twitch for a long time and – who knows? – may one day find itself resurrected under different political circumstances. It is to his great credit, however, that James G. Stewart has turned away from searching frantically for signs of life in the fallen statute, in order to explore other fruitful approaches. Anyway, how much good did the ATS do, even before it was cut down? (Full disclosure: I have been flamed on this blog simply for raising this question, as if the burden weren’t on advocates of the ATS strategy to prove how much difference it has made, and to consider it in relation to other possible political and legal strategies.) I won’t comment much on Stewart’s alternative, corporate criminal liability, in part because his other respondents know a lot more about the details. His reading of the tea leaves of the Argor-Heraeus case seems speculative but impressive, and his assessment of the doctrinal possibilities of criminal liability relative to the ATS strategy is interesting. As Stewart points out, a civil liability strategy merely taxing corporations (especially when the tax is simply passed on to their consumers) looks insufficient if it doesn’t provide the social condemnation law secures through criminal opprobrium. Stewart might even be right that if we have to choose, the criminal strategy is normatively superior. Of course, in an ideal world, it would be better to have both, since a now potentially lost civil liability in theory should exist: victims may need and deserve the monetary compensation too.
|
24 Nov

This week we will host a mini-symposium on James G. Stewart's latest article, The Turn to Corporate Criminal Liability for International Crimes: Transcending the Alien Tort Statute. James has been an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Allard Hall, University of British Columbia, where he as been since 2009. Previously he was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School...

|
21 Nov

[Rob Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU and is guest blogging this week here at Opinio Juris. His first post can be found here; his second, here and his third here.] Today at NYU law we are having a panel discussion, and celebration, of my colleague Liam Murphy's recent book, What Makes Law Law? (I'll be racing down from Fordham University, where I'm talking about my own...

|
20 Nov

[Rob Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU and is guest blogging this week here at Opinio Juris. His first post can be found here and his second, here.] At International Economic Law and Policy Blog, where I'm a regular, I've been blogging for a while about the impasse in WTO Doha round negotiations and how to break through it. See here and here.  India has learned from the way developed countries operated in the previous Uruguay Round of negotiations, linking different issue areas or agreements, so for example rich nations could get developing countries to agree to TRIPs (intellectual property rules), on the basis that they had to do it to get something on agriculture, etc.  So, in this round, the Indians have insisted that implementing trade facilitation (mostly a developed country demand) depends on protection against WTO challenge for food security programs like India's food subsidies for its poor. With a bilateral deal between India and the US last week on food security, there is now the opportunity to move forward to complete the package negotiated in December 2013 at the Bali WTO Ministerial, and then, beyond that, to strike further deals that make the WTO as a negotiating forum relevant to the issues of today and tomorrow.  Reflecting the diversity of the WTO's membership, some of these accords will be plurilateral, not binding all Members, but rather in the manner of "coalitions of the willing", but still  (at least eventually) under the WTO umbrella, using its well-developed dispute settlement system and institutional framework.  Thus, another bilateral accord in recent weeks, between the US and China, will allow the Members involved to push forward with a new version of the plurilateral Information Technology Agreement (ITA).  At the same time, negotiations on liberalization of green goods have been happening in Geneva, another plurilateral initiative, where US leadership has been crucial (Canada's WTO Ambassador, Jonathan Fried, has also given these talks a big push). So, contrary to what the pessimists have been saying, the WTO is far from dead these days.  But some are claiming that the recent breakthrough is in fact trivial and disguises the virtual irrelevance of the current WTO agenda.  Financial Times journalist Alan Beattie, writing yesterday on one of the FT's blogs, claims that reaching agreement with India on food security in order to push forward on the Trade Facilitation Agreement is hardly a victory, at all but perhaps a defeat in disguise.  Part of  Beattie's argument is that the TFA is an unimportant accord, which has been blown up in significance because other elements of the Doha round agenda proved largely impossible to move forward on (such as genuine reform of rules on agriculture).   So what is the real story about trade facilitation?  Beattie is more wrong than right, and here's why. First of all, a little explanation of the jargon.  Trade facilitation is about improving customs administration, and the necessary infrastructure to move goods across borders.  Sounds boring, but the losses to otherwise efficient trade from these kinds of bottlenecks at the border, whether do to as corruption and incompetence, or just inadequate resources or out-of-date technology, are real.  One may question whether, however, the WTO, or indeed any set of legal rules, is up to tackling this kind of issue: it seems more a matter of institution-building, support for new technology and infrastructure, and rule of law/governance activities such as training of officials and redesign of domestic agencies.  In other words, if anything, the World Bank's and regional development banks' sort of thing, not the WTO's.  Thus, I myself have in the past expressed skepticism about how much the WTO can do in this area.  (An excellent guide to the TFA by Ole Miss law professor Antonia Eliason can be found here). Yet, as Ruti Teitel and I have argued in our essay "Beyond Compliance,"
|
19 Nov

[Rob Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU and is guest blogging this week here at Opinio Juris. His first post can be found here.] After a long period of relative neglect of such studies, there's a boom in scholarship in the history of international law, as Alexandra Kemmerer noted at Voelkerrechtsblog early this fall. Kemmerer suggests, rightly, that disciplinary boundaries...

|
19 Nov

[Andrea Pin is senior lecturer at the University of Padua, where he teaches constitutional law, comparative public law, and Islamic law. He is also a fall 2014 Kellogg visiting fellow at Notre Dame.] A few weeks ago, the Italian Constitutional Court’s decision no. 238 of 2014 struck blows to the theory and practice of sovereign immunity, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), German-Italian relationships, and even the Italian Government. On October 3, 2012, the ICJ decided that the customary sovereign immunity from jurisdiction protects Germany from suits brought before Italian domestic courts seeking compensation for Nazi crimes perpetrated in Italy during World War II. Later on, new suits were filed against Germany in Italian domestic courts. This time, Italian judges requested a preliminary ruling from the Italian Constitutional Court to ascertain if the sovereign immunity protection, as crafted by the ICJ, was against the Italian Constitution. If the Court found that such immunity violated the Constitution, the judges would process the suits. The Constitutional text proclaims that “The Italian legal system conforms to the generally recognised rules of international law” (Art. no. 10). International customary law falls in this category and therefore prevails over incompatible domestic legal provisions. But there has always been a caveat: the generally recognized rules of international law cannot be enforced in Italy if they conflict with the supreme principles of the Constitution. This is the doctrine of counter-limits, which the Constitutional Court shaped with special regards to the European Union integration: according to this doctrine, core constitutional values would set exceptional boundaries to the domestic enforcement of EU laws, which can ordinarily subordinate constitutional provisions. The hypothetical non-enforcement of international law for violating a supreme constitutional value had never become reality—until now. The 2014 decision of the Constitutional Court found that Art. no. 24 of the Constitution (“All persons are entitled to take judicial action to protect their individual rights and legitimate interests”) encapsulates a fundamental principle of the Constitution. Therefore, the Court blocked the application of sovereign immunity from jurisdiction, and allowed the referring Italian judges to proceed with the relevant trials. This unprecedented decision surely is in conflict with the ICJ Statute. In fact, the Italian Court consequently struck down the pieces of Italian legislation that commanded the enforcement of the ICJ’s judgments in cases of gross human rights violations as well. But it will also create some turbulence in the relationships between Italy and Germany. The Constitutional Court’s decision, finally, is in conflict with the Italian Government’s attitude. After the ICJ’s judgment, the Government signed and had the Parliament execute the New York Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property (2004). This Convention confirmed the ICJ’s approach to sovereign immunity: practically speaking, after losing at the ICJ, the Italian State happily legitimized Germany’s jurisdictional immunity. The Constitutional Court also needed to quash these pieces of Italian legislation.
|
18 Nov

[Rob Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU and is guest blogging this week here at Opinio Juris.] According to Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of The National Interest, the neocons are about to make a spectacular comeback in American foreign policy.  Writing about the midterm elections in the Financial Times last Friday, Heilbrunn observed: "the Republican party is resurrecting the unilateral foreign policy doctrines that first took hold under President George W Bush and his vice-president Dick Cheney." So let's take a hard look at the weapons the neocons have in their arsenal these days. The first, as Heilbrunn notes, is Barack Obama, or more precisely discontent with his apparently reactive and hesitating approach to foreign and security policy, exemplified by situations such as Ukraine, Syria and the rise of ISIS.  If you read the fine print, to the extent there is any, the neocons like Cheney and Bill Kristol don't have any master plan or worked out strategy of their own for dealing with these problems.  They appeal to the heartwarming (for some Americans) fantasy that, if the United States simply drops enough bombs and puts enough boots on the ground, victory over the forces of evil will prevail.  In this fantasy world, every apparent failure of intervention--Afghanistan, Iraq--can be explained by not enough American force being applied.  Consider Bill Kristol's approach to ISIS: "What's the harm in bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?" This is the key logic:force has got to be better than no force, a sort of dogmatic inversion of pacifism. Of course, Kristol's remark also speaks volumes to the neocons' stance toward international law. Then there is Senator-elect Tom Cotton.  As Heilbrunn notes,"Perhaps no one has been more impassioned in their support of the foreign policy of George W Bush than Tom Cotton." Cotton, 37 years old, is the neocon wet dream.  After Harvard College (where he wrote for the Crimson, citing intellectual idols Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss) and Harvard Law School, Cotton signed up for the military insisting that he be sent into combat in Iraq.  While, as the legend goes, the army urged him toward a JAG-type position, Cotton would have none of it:  he had little interest in the laws of war, he wanted to fight one.  Cotton is perhaps the most credible of any of the neocons--he, at least, chose to risk his life in the war that he praised as "just and noble".  He has also (at least somewhat) distanced himself from the main neocon strategy of withering attacks on Barack Obama, calling on Republicans to support the President's plan for use of force in Syria and rather nobly lecturing partisan Republican conservatives: "we have one commander in chief at a time, and the United States is weakened if our presidency is weakened. No matter the president’s party or his past failures, all Americans should want, and help, him to succeed when it comes to our national security."   While he shares the outlook of the ideological and partisan neocons, offering his conviction that America can and should seek "victory" in Afghanistan and Iraq, my hunch is that, given that he has had the responsibility as a soldier for the lives of men and women in combat, Cotton may actually prove a constructive and moderating force behind the scenes, if he does not consume too much energy in battles with the isolationist Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party.
|
18 Nov

As I read – and re-read – the OTP’s decision regarding the attack on the Mavi Marmara, one thought kept going through my mind: what was the OTP thinking? Why would it produce a 61-page document explaining why, despite finding reason to believe the IDF had committed war crimes during the attack, it was not going to open an investigation?...

|
16 Nov

[Daniel Bodansky is Foundation Professor of Law at Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.] Is the US-China joint announcement on climate change a big deal? Opinions differ widely. Paul Krugman says yes, Tyler Cowan, no. Who’s right? Is the announcement a “gamechanger,” as Joe Romm thinks, or “a well-timed, well-orchestrated press release,” as Cowan calls it? In part, the different answers reflect different measures of success, a point to which I will return in a moment. But, first, a little background. Back in 2011, the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the Durban Platform, which launched negotiations to develop a new legal instrument to limit global greenhouse gas emissions post-2020. The Durban Platform negotiations are to be completed and a new agreement adopted in December 2015 at the Paris conference of the parties. A decision adopted last year in Warsaw called on states to communicate their intended national contributions to the new agreement well in advance of the Paris meeting. What the United States and China unveiled in Beijing – although generally characterized as an “agreement” or “pact” – were their intended national emission targets under the 2015 agreement. At least four metrics are relevant in evaluating the joint announcement: First, do the announced targets put us on a pathway towards limiting climate change to safe levels? Safety involves value judgments, of course, but most scientists believe that warming of more 1.5-2° C above pre-industrial levels would result in dangerous impacts – impacts that most people would wish to avoid. (The earth is already about .8 degrees warmer than pre-industrial level, so we’re almost halfway there.) Even the most ardent boosters of the US-China deal don’t claim that, by itself, it will put the world on a 2° pathway, only that it is a first step. Second, do the targets announced by the United States and China represent a significant improvement over business as usual? Or, to put it differently, will achieving them require the US and China to significantly ratchet up their level of effort? Here, opinions differ widely, because they depend on judgments about what would happen in the absence of the targets, which in turn depend on assumptions about the economy, technology, and government policies more generally – all of which are highly uncertain. Who would have predicted, ten years ago, the Great Recession and the rapid expansion of fracking, both of which have had a huge influence on US emissions? So it is perhaps not surprising that some analysts say the US-China announcement “doesn’t change things much,” while others think it represents a major advance. Climate Interactive, for example, calculates that the US-China targets, if fully implemented, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 650 billion tons through 2100 – and if other countries follow suit, taking similar targets, global emissions would be reduced by about 2500 billion tons through 2100. A brief sampling of estimates of Chinese and US emissions: 
|
12 Nov

[Jean d’Aspremont is a Professor of International Law, University of Manchester and a Professor of International Legal Theory, University of Amsterdam.] The identification of customary international law is à la mode among international lawyers. Seminars, research handbooks, special symposia in scholarly journals and on-line discussions devoted to the question are mushrooming these days. Arguments and constructions heard on these occasions are sometimes admirably...

|
05 Nov

[Giacomo Pailli is a PhD in comparative law at University of Florence, Italy] Many readers will recall the judgment of the International Court of Justice in Germany v. Italy, where the Court upheld Germany’s claim of immunity under international law vis-a-vis Italy’s exercise of jurisdiction over certain Nazi crimes that had occurred during World War II. The decision received a lot...

|
30 Oct

Earlier this year, Chris Gevers blogged about the Zimbabwe Torture Docket case, in which the Constitutional Court of South Africa was asked to determine whether the South African Police Service (SAPS) is required to investigate allegations that high-ranking government and security officials in Zimbabwe committed acts of torture. Those acts took place solely in Zimbabwe and involved only Zimbabweans, so the key...

|