Sixty-six years ago today, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a national radio audience to discuss his recent meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference. Stalin secured commitments to open up a second front against Germany. Roosevelt secured a commitment from Stalin to support an international security organization. 1943 was the turning point in the...
I want to interrupt our Copenhagen focus to briefly flag a conversation that's on-going over at EJIL: Talk! My Temple Law colleague, Jeff Dunoff, along with Joel Trachtman (The Fletcher School) recently put out a new work--Ruling the World? Constitutionalism, International Law and Global Governance (Cambridge, 2009), which is the focus of EJIL's latest on-line symposium. Here's a description of the book project in brief: Ruling...
The Copenhagen process is multilateral, focused on reaching global agreements. But to get to a strong and truly effective global climate regime, bold bilateral initiatives may be needed. The conditions are propitious for a deal between China and the US, the world’s largest and second largest emitters, but that will call for imaginative and committed leadership on both sides as...
Der Spiegel has an excellent story on the possibility that a Eurozone country might default on its sovereign debt, with economic, political, and legal consequences that could be anything from serious to dire. The country is Greece: Greece has already accumulated a mountain of debt that will be difficult if not impossible to pay off. The government has borrowed more than...
[This is a guest post by Professor Greg Gordon of the University of North Dakota. Professor Gordon is the Director of the UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, an expert on international criminal law and a past guest blogger at Opinio Juris.] Earlier this week, Spanish National Court Judge Balthazar Garzon initiated money laundering proceedings against the widow...
I will write on this at greater length in a couple of days after a few of the key parties have made their arguments. For now, I just want to note that the oral proceeding transcripts will be available here. In the Tuesday morning session (which is all that has been posted at the time of this writing), Serbia set out...
Americans who defend the legality of the invasion of Iraq almost invariably point to the fact that Britain's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, also approved the invasion. That argument has always been questionable; rumours have long circulated that Lord Goldsmith did not believe that the invasion was legal, but was pressured by Downing Street into approving it anyway. According to an explosive...
The just-released CFR web publication "Public Opinion on Global Issues" offers one-stop shopping for those looking for public opinion surveys across a range of transnational policy issues. The overview explains how CFR and the Univ. of Maryland consolidated all publicly available opinion polls and provides a few significant findings: The international community confronts a daunting array of transnational threats and challenges...
I criticize the Registry regularly, so it's important to acknowledge when it does something right. I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the Registry's indefensible position that Dr. Karadzic's trial had not started, so the defence team was not entitled to any funding until the trial "began" in March. The Registry has now reversed its decision and approved 250...
The Nation has just published an extensive article documenting the "secret war" Blackwater employees have been conducting in Pakistan. The opening grafs: At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which...
One of the remarkable differences between the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration in terms of international litigation is the utter silence of this State Department in filing amicus briefs and/or statements of interest. I know that Harold Koh has only been Legal Adviser since June and Sarah Cleveland has only been Counselor on International Law since September, but...
This story from the New York Times about the corruption of Teodoro Obiang certainly hits close to home. His $35 million dollar estate in Malibu is just down the hill from Pepperdine. Several times a year, Teodoro Nguema Obiang arrives at the doorstep of the United States from his home in Equatorial Guinea, on his way to his...
