Courts & Tribunals

Many people are surprised that Germain Katanga has dropped his appeal, particularly given Judge Van den Wyngaert's savage dissent. I'm not surprised in the least, because it locks in his sentence, which the OTP planned to appeal. Katanga's 12-year sentence is even shorter than Lubanga's, and he has already spent seven years in pre-trial detention. In fact, he'll be eligible for...

As everyone on Twitter knows by now, the US government has released the notorious memorandum in which the OLC provides the supposed legal justification for killing Anwar al-Awlaki. I'm a bit disappointed not to get a mention in the memo; people in the know have suggested that a post I wrote in April 2010 led the OLC to substantially rewrite it. Vanity aside, though, I'm...

Most of the discussion about Abu Khattallah's capture in Libya has focused on the operation's basis -- or lack thereof -- in domestic US law. Less attention has been paid to whether international law permitted the US to use force on Libyan soil. As Marty Lederman recently noted at Just Security, Abu Khattallah's capture can potentially be justified on two different grounds:...

I'm not sure how I missed this, but these are very strong -- and atypically blunt -- allegations by Fatou Bensouda: The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Fatou Bensouda urged the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to investigate reports that the UN peacekeeping force in Darfur (UNAMID) deliberately contributed in covering up crimes in the restive region. In reference to US-based Foreign Policy...

[caption id="attachment_30807" align="alignnone" width="130"] photo: NYU Law School[/caption] I am sad to mark the passing of one of the giants of international law, and one of my teachers, Professor Andreas Lowenfeld of NYU Law School. His career was exemplary; Andy operated at the highest levels of practice and academia. In an era when so many scholars and practitioners become hyper-focused on...

The conflict between China and Vietnam over a Chinese oil rig has (thankfully) calmed down a little bit, with fewer reports of rammings and water cannon fights in the South China Sea.  But the war of press release and government-sponsored editorials has heated up and all of them are wielding international law as a weapon of authority and legitimacy. Vietnam's government...

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...

[Karen J Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University and co-direcor at iCourts Center of Excellence at the Copenhagen University Faculty of Law.] Thanks so much to Tonya Putnam, Roger Alford, and Jacob Katz Cogan for their thoughtful commentaries.  I appreciate their kind words, and their comments reflect one of my hopes for this book; that it will be a springboard for researching new and important questions about international courts and international law. I want to respond while echoing some of the questions they raise. My starting point for The New Terrain of International Law was the following question:  If the ‘problem’ of international law is its lack of enforceability, then how does making the law enforceable affect the influence of international law? I cut into this very big question by focusing on a new set of institutions that were designed to address the enforceability gap in international law.  The comments in this symposium push upon a number of choices I made as I then tried to make the project tractable. My first choice was to focus on the universe of permanent international courts, co-opting the definition of an IC created by the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (PICT). Alford’s commentary openly worries that others will follow me in focusing on PICT courts. I share this concern, which is why I discuss the limits of relying on PICT’s definition (p.70-77). For me, the most arbitrary part of the definition is its focus on permanent ICs. I decided to nonetheless catalogue permanent ICs because sticking to a plausible definition ensured that I was examining like institutions. Another related question I sometimes get is why I include ICs that exist but have no cases. This is where the benefits of PICT’s definition arise.  We can see from my universe that permanence is neither necessary nor sufficient for IC effectiveness, and we can start to examine why like institutions have varied impact.  This is a topic that Laurence Helfer and I have pursued through our in depth research on the Andean Court and on Africa’s ICs. I am already moving beyond PICT’s definition, as should we all. The New Terrain of International Law demonstrates the arbitrariness of focusing on permanent ICs by including as case-studies non-permanent bodies. The NAFTA case study, for example, discusses how the “permanent” WTO system proved no more able than the NAFTA system to address complaints about illegal US countervailing duties. The Chapter 5 discussion of the ICJ’s role in the Bahrain-Qatar dispute, and the same court’s ineffectiveness in resolving US-Iranian disputes, shows again that being a permanent IC, with preappointed judges and the jurisdiction to issue binding rulings, still does not necessarily improve IC effectiveness. Another step in moving beyond PICT’s definition is that Chapter 1 of the new Oxford Handbook on International Adjudication, which I co-authored with the author of PICT’s definition, Cesare Romano, excludes permanence from the definition of “adjudicatory bodies.” A second choice was to use structured case studies as the mode of investigating how the existence of an IC contributes (or not) to changes in state behavior in the direction indicated by the law.  Nico Krisch addresses indirectly my case-study choice in his reply on EJIL:Talk!