How Does a Hybrid Tribunal for Iraq and Afghanistan Sound?
Colum Lynch reports today at FP.com that the United States is pushing for the creation of a hybrid international criminal tribunal for Syria by...
Colum Lynch reports today at FP.com that the United States is pushing for the creation of a hybrid international criminal tribunal for Syria by...
There have been lots of reports out in the last 24 hours saying that the Government of Vietnam is planning to take legal action against China for its movement of an oil rig into disputed waters in the South China Sea. Indeed, the Philippines Government has stated that Vietnam has consulted it about its ongoing arbitration case against China and...
As I've noted before, Ukraine's Constitutional Court has held that the Ukraine cannot ratify the Rome Statute because -- in the words of the ICRC -- "the administration of justice is the exclusive competence of the courts and...
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Security Council referring the situation in Syria to the ICC, not the least of which is that an ICC investigation is unlikely to accomplish anything given the ongoing conflict. (One that Assad is almost certainly going to win.) But just in case that's not enough, take a gander at this provision...
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...
This lawsuit is mostly just grandstanding by a very small nation with the help of a savvy (but sloppy) US law firm. But there is one possibly meaningful outcome. It could result in an ICJ proceeding involving the United Kingdom. The tiny Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands is taking on the United States and the world's eight other nuclear-armed nations with an...
Let me join others in heaping praise on Karen Alter’s new book. It marks a growing trend of studying international law from an institutional rather than substantive perspective. My favorite aspect of the book is the lateral thinking that occurs when one examines international tribunals across disciplines. International law scholars typically labor in their own vineyards, missing...
This week we are working with EJIL:Talk! to bring you a symposium on Karen Alter's (Northwestern) book The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press). Here is the abstract: In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. The...