Excellent news -- and a major blow to the AU's promise of impunity for Bashir, given the symbolic and practical importance of South Africa for the continent generally: SOUTH Africa will arrest Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir if he visits the country, despite an African Union decision to ignore a war crimes warrant against him, the foreign ministry said yesterday. Civil society...
Iran and Syria have a new neighbor! ...
Raustiala’s book is about the scope of constitutional protections applied abroad. I did not find much in the book addressing whether the Constitution imposes limits on the extraterritorial exercise of federal power. Why is that? We have a robust and well-developed Interstate Commerce Clause jurisprudence, but we have precious little guidance as to the scope or even...
Great book Kal. Kudos and adulations. I have a question of clarification. One of the interesting things about Raustiala's discussion of the modern application of territoriality is the uniqueness of Guantanamo. He writes, "Guantanamo's unusual legal status is reflect in [its] history, and is underscored by two factors. One is the lack of any status...
On July 22nd, the tribunal arbitrating the dispute between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/ Army over the Abyei region rendered its final award concerning boundary delimitation (and, effectively, oil resource exploitation rights). (Links to the webcasts of the oral proceedings here.) The Washington Post reports: Sudan's fragile peace overcame a major hurdle Wednesday when a legal panel...
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is in trouble in the UN, according to a dismayed account in this week's Economist ("An idea whose time has come - and gone?" Economist, July 25, 2009, p 58). I'm dismayed, too. At the 2005 UN reform summit of the General Assembly, says the Economist the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders accepted the principle that they have...
Recently, advocates for asylum seekers fleeing severe and state-sanctioned domestic violence in their home countries appeared to score a significant victory. In the case of a woman who requested asylum based on fears she would be murdered by her common-law husband in Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security filed a brief in April (unsealed recently as reported by the...
Rather than comment on the refreshingly tough realism or seriously imprudent bear-baiting of Vice-President Biden's recent remarks on Russia ("Russia will bend to the US"), or whether there is an important and dangerous gap between short-term and long-term in the collapse of an imperial nuclear power even if the long-run claim is true, etc., let me instead offer a background...
David Bernstein is back with yet another attack on Human Rights Watch. This time, Bernstein is up in arms that, in 2006, HRW retracted a claim that armed Palestinian groups had committed war crimes by using human shields -- an action that he believes proves, in light of HRW's refusal to apologize for its allegedly false criticisms of Israel, that...
Well, that's exactly what the Obama Administration did this past Wednesday. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the 1976 ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) on behalf of the United States with the intention that her signature serve as the requisite act of accession, bringing the treaty immediately into force for the United States. Now, the treaty does not commit the United States...
The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and...
For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...
