Regions

Re the Volokh post to which Kevin refers below. Fear not, I was not trying to withhold content from OJ readers, but it did seem to me that I was days late in arriving at the issue that Ben and Kevin had already been discussing, whereas my VC post went into a lot of other stuff that didn't strike me as relevant to OJ readers.  Although we are pretty eclectic in our tastes here, as my personal drone post shows, I've sometimes had email complaints from readers wondering what the connection to international law is re some post of mine.  Am I wrong about that among our readers?  But anyway, my fundamental motivation in posting it to VC and then linking back to the OJ discussion was blog-strategic - drive some traffic over to OJ from Volokh.  I'm not trying to deprive OJ or its readers of my 'invaluable' thoughts. Very quickly as to substance in one matter of Kevin's response.  Kevin says I'm offering a caricature of Nils' view on territoriality and armed conflict.  Maybe.  But what Kevin calls caricature, I'd say is a reasonable statement in a couple of paragraphs on a blog of the center of Nils', and the ICRC's, views.  That's not a criticism.  There is a lot to be said for the view that armed conflict has geographical limits on it.  The ICRC, if I may summarize, or caricature, as you will, reached this view on the perfectly sensible and understandable grounds of its alarm over the Bush administration's Global War on Terror claims.  I think that the GWOT reached too far - as I have said many places, in my view - once again, a summary or caricature, as you will - what the Bush administration sought was the tail of law wagging the dog of war, the ability to use the law of war anywhere in the world with or without actual hostilities. The ICRC unsurprisingly became alarmed at this, and has - including through Nils' work - moved to a largely geographically based view of armed conflict.  I understand and sympathize with the reasons, in part because I share them and in part because even where I don't share the final conclusion and come to a different view, I do try to start with a sympathetic view to the argument and understand it on its own terms.  The sympathetic read of that argument is that the Bush administration wanted a global war in order to invoke the law of armed conflict anywhere, at any time, but without any connection to actual hostilities.  As I say, I reach a different view - different from the GWOT view or Nils' view, but I think I am starting from a position of seeking to understand it.  And for that matter, one of the reasons I think I understand it as a "large" view in the law of war is that some of the senior ICRC staff deliberately reached out to me for exactly the same reason - they heard what Koh was saying, what I was saying, what different people were saying, and they were admirably trying very hard to understand the positions and how they differed from their own.

Brad Roth has sent along a link to this New York Times editorial, which begins: If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? That is a question about which the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls — is now seeking expert legal advice. It is also a question the...

Julian's latest snide swipe at the ICC focuses on Bashir's visit to Kenya, which he describes as a "slap in the face to the ICC Prosecutor and the defenders of the Bashir arrest warrant."  Not surprisingly, Julian conveniently fails to mention the details of Bashir's visit: Sudanese President Omar al Bashir curiously flew in through Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, and ...

So says a draft UN report that studied events in the Congo between 1993 and 2008: An exhaustive U.N. investigation into the history of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has concluded that the Rwandan military and its allies carried out hundreds of large-scale killings of ethnic Hutu refugees during the 1990s that amounted to war crimes,...

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....

[We are pleased to have David Glazier, a professor of law at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, share his thoughts on the U.S. District Court's recent interpretation of the piracy statute in U.S. v. Said] As I read Judge Jackson’s decision, the crux of his holding boils down to the following syllogism: (1) Federal criminal statutes must be interpreted according to the...

In the first U.S. court opinion on piracy since 1820, a U.S. judge in Norfolk, Virginia has dismissed piracy charges against Somali defendants in United States v. Said. The Court held that attempted piracy is not piracy for the purposes of U.S. criminal law.  (h/t  Eugene Volokh). As I mentioned in an earlier post, the relevant U.S. statute criminalizing piracy leaves...

Two commenters on my previous post on Kagame's increasing authoritarianism questioned whether Rwanda arrested Peter Erlinder because of his representation of defendants at the ICTR.  Fortuitously, Kate Gibson -- my colleague on the Karadzic case and a defense attorney at the ICTR -- has just published an ASIL Insight on the arrest that supports my claim.  Here is a taste...

Hell must have had central air conditioning installed, because I find myself in complete agreement with Ruth Wedgwood's recent post at EJIL: Talk! on Paul Kagame's rapid descent into authoritarianism.  Here is a snippet: The West’s failure to address Tutsi violations of the laws of war has allowed Kagame to conclude, justifiably, that he can do nearly anything with...

Actually, I'm not, although I'm confident Labor will pull out the election.  But I'm endlessly fascinated by the fact that people place bets on the outcome of the election -- and that the latest odds are treated as serious news by The Age, the best newspaper in Australia: Labor has been the subject of a huge betting plunge on it winning...