According to Standard & Poor's, Argentina has defaulted on at least some of its sovereign bonds, after last minute negotiations failed to reach a deal with its holdout bondholders, who had won a series of victories in U.S. court. Although there are reports that some U.S. banks representing the rest of the bondholders are exploring ways to buy out the holdout bondholders...
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Medellin v. Texas that rulings of the International Court of Justice are not "self-executing" under U.S. law. For this reason, the Supreme Court refused to require Texas to stop executions that the ICJ had held in violation of U.S. treaty obligations. It looks like Colombia's Constitutional Court has followed that same approach...
Last week's NETmundial conference serves as a reminder of just how much the nature of cyberspace remains (at least theoretically) undetermined. We still can't agree on what kind of resource cyberspace "is": Is it a global public good as Sir Tim Berners Lee proclaimed (i.e., a res communis) or just a collection of technology subject to sovereignty regulation like so...
[Michael D. Ramsey is the Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Professor of Law at the University of San Diego Law School. Professor Ramsey previously prepared an analysis of this case for the Judicial Education Project, for which he was compensated.] The Supreme Court considered on Monday whether a U.S. court can order disclosure of Argentina’s worldwide assets. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer should...
[Andrés Guzmán Escobari is a former Bolivian diplomat, a Professor at Universidad del Valle and Universidad de los Andes and an associate researcher for the German Foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. The opinions expressed are strictly personal.]
A few days after Bolivia instituted proceedings against Chile before the International Court of Justice, Julian Ku wrote a post here on Opinio Juris entitled “Bolivia´s Ridiculously Weak ICJ Case against Chile”. His main claim? “This case looks like a sure loser on admissibility; it looks like it is going to be a major waste of time for the ICJ”.
In this post, I would like to offer a rebuttal to Mr Ku’s comments and to explain why Bolivia’s case is not only not a ‘sure loser’ but is reasonably strong. The case concerns Bolivia’s request that the Court declare and adjudge that “Chile has the obligation to negotiate with Bolivia in order to reach an agreement granting Bolivia a fully sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean” because “Chile has breached the said obligation”. Specifically, for that reason, “Chile must perform the said obligation with good faith, promptly, formally, within a reasonable time and effectively, to grant Bolivia a fully sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean”.
Mr Ku develops two mains arguments to support his opinion: (1) that there is no compulsory ICJ jurisdiction under the Bogota Treaty; and (2) that there is no specific obligation on Chile to negotiate an agreement granting Bolivia an access to the Pacific Ocean because the language of the declarations made by Chilean authorities with the purpose of giving Bolivia back sovereign access to the sea were “non-obligatory”.
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...
There’s never a boring year in international law and 2013 turned out to be particularly eventful: Syria, major cases in front of national and international courts, a possible nuclear deal with Iran, and turmoil in Eastern Europe, Egypt, and South Sudan, to name but a few reasons. This post is not an attempt to log all that we have written about...
I had the pleasure of participating in a very interesting discussion yesterday of Argentina's debt litigation at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Richard Samp offered a useful overview of this litigation, and my own talk focused on the strange (and in my view inappropriate) way that the U.S. legal system allows sovereigns to waive immunity from courts, but continues to...
I've been following Argentina's travails in the U.S. courts with great interest, even penning an oped on the subject back in January on their standoff with sovereign debt creditors in Ghana. Argentina and the so-called "holdout" creditors have been battling out their dispute in the federal courts of New York for years. So it is interesting to note that Argentina...