In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Europe

02 Mar

[Róisín Pillay is Director of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) Europe Programme.]  The European Court of Human Rights is once more facing a political challenge to its role, in proposals for a new political declaration put forward by the Danish Presidency of the Council of Europe.  That the Court’s extraordinary success in advancing human rights protection in Europe provokes the dissent...

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29 Oct

International law is famously mushy and subject to a variety of interpretations.  But there are some issues upon which there is more consensus under international law, such as the illegality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  But is there any reasonable argument favoring the legality of the Catalan Parliament’s recent declaration of independence from Spain?  I don’t think so. At the outset,...

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25 Oct

I have just posted on SSRN a draft of a (very) long article entitled "Specially-Affected States and the Formation of Custom." It represents my first real foray into both "classic" public international law and postcolonial critique. Here is the abstract: Although the US has consistently relied on the ICJ’s doctrine of specially-affected states to claim that it and other powerful states...

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17 Jul

[Dr. Aaron Matta is an expert in international law with working experience at International Courts. He also recently co-founded The Hague Council on Advancing International Justice, a network for and with practitioners, academics, and policymakers in the area of international justice. I would like to thank Dr. Philip Ambach and Anda Scarlat for their feedback on earlier drafts of this commentary.The...

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07 Jun

The estimable professor-pundit Daniel Drezner has a typically smart blogpost on President Trump's refusal to affirm the U.S. commitment to Article 5's collective defense provision of the North Atlantic Treaty.  I don't have a problem with his views here, but I can't help jumping in to correct this paragraph from his post: So why is this such a big deal of a story? The United...

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18 Mar

This morning President Trump tweeted that "Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!" But that's not how NATO commitments work. And so this afternoon, former US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder gave President Trump a tutorial in nine tweets. Maybe we can...

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16 Dec

As discussed in my previous post, last month I was privileged to organize a conference at Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway on the topic of UK trade and Brexit. I discussed the first session in my previous post, which addressed UK trade negotiations with the EU. [embed]https://youtu.be/V5MYdhzXGAM?list=PLUqez-g-qh0lEWRv2XxnmZ_MmPRPZTzTD[/embed] In our second session, we discussed the topic of UK trade negotiations...

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08 Dec

On November 7, 2016 I was privileged to organize a conference at the University of Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway on the topic of UK trade and Brexit. The conference had three sessions: (1) UK trade negotiations with the EU; (2) UK trade negotiations outside the EU; and (3) UK’s post-Brexit status within the WTO. The participants were...

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04 Nov

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,...

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03 Nov

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...

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20 Oct

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'...

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