Let's just put this one in the "I couldn't have made this up" files. According to the explanation attached to the YouTube clip: Lip dub for the independence of Catalonia and the rest of the Catalan Countries, recorded October the 24th 2010 in the city of Vic. Achieving a total amount of 5.771 participants, the World Records Academy awarded the World...
Gotta say, even though I write about issues of self-determination, secession, and statehood, I didn't expect to read this on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times: At a glance it looked like any small-town fair, with smoke wafting from the barbecue, families gathering around picnic tables, music percolating over loudspeakers and doting parents...
In the past twenty years the world of investment arbitration has taken the commercial world by storm. There are over 2,750 bilateral investment treaties and almost every one of them has an arbitration provision. Investment arbitration is now a prominent feature of the arbitration landscape. Just as BITs have proliferated in recent years, so too have free...
Obama apologized on Friday for experiments conducted in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948 in which American scientists deliberately infected prison inmates, prostitutes, and mental patients with syphilis without their consent. The apology is a striking reminder that the Nazis were not the only ones that conducted horrific, non-consensual medical experiments on human subjects in the first half of the 20th...
Something that our European readers have already probably heard as it is one of the most viewed stories on the BBC website (but not so much here in the U.S.), the Basque separatist terrorist organization ETA has renounced (at least for now) the use of violence: Armed Basque separatist group Eta says it will not carry out "armed actions" in its campaign for...
Next week the ICJ will have oral proceedings in the case Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Georgia v. Russian Federation). The .pdf of the press release is here. As far as I can tell, unlike in the Kosovo proceedings, there will not be an internet simulcast. (The Kosovo simulcast was very...
It's not often that you run into a story that combines international arbitration, Kremlin politics, post-Soviet autocrats, utopian urban projects, transnational networks, electoral politics, and chess. So, read on...
So reports Reuters: The Dutch prosecutor's office said on Friday it would look into whether Dutch peacekeeping soldiers should face criminal charges over the 1995 massacre in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed at Srebrenica after Bosnian Serb forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave where Dutch troops were ...
Last month the Second Circuit issued a remarkable ruling that threatens to upend the longstanding rule of successor state liability for the credit obligations of predecessor states. It did so by ruling that the automatic assumption of liability of sovereign debt of the predecessor state under international law is not a “commercial activity” within the meaning of the FSIA....
[John Cerone is Professor of International Law, and Director of the Center for International Law & Policy at New England Law | Boston] The World Court’s conclusion that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was not unlawful is being with a resounding "duh" by most international lawyers. The International Court of Justice, in the narrow advisory opinion, simply found that the making of...
Now that I've had a chance to read through the ICJ's advisory opinion, following are a few initial reactions. (I will consider the separate opinions in another post.) Marko Milanovic has done a great job parsing the main issues that were at bar, namely 1. Whether the ICJ should exercise advisory jurisdiction in this case; 2. How broadly or narrowly the question posed by...
I don't make that claim lightly. Despite my belief that Moreno-Ocampo has been a disaster as a prosecutor, I have consistently opposed calls for his removal, whether because of his retaliation against an employee for accusing him of sexual harassment or because he decided to pursue genocide charges against Bashir. I even opposed his ouster when his misuse of confidentiality...
