It has become quite common to describe the downing of MH17 as a war crime. In late July, for example, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that "[t]his violation of international law, given the prevailing circumstances, may amount to a war crime," More recently, William Burke-White has said that, for framing purposes, "[t]he time has come for governments...
Now that President Obama and his advisors have offered some more detail on the domestic legal basis for U.S. military's action in Iraq, I think it is even more clear now than when I first posted on this subject that the administration is relying on some sort of Article II Commander-In-Chief power to "prevent an act of genocide" against a Iraqi...
Kirsty Brimelow QC, the chair of the Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC) -- and a colleague of mine at Doughty Street Chambers -- has responded to my position on the 2009 Declaration, as recounted by Joshua Rozenberg in this Guardian article. Here is the relevant paragraph: Neither Rozenberg's opinion piece nor academic he relies upon, Kevin Heller, cite the text of the 2012 decision in support...
Assuming there really was authorization from the Iraqi government, I don't have any doubt that the U.S. has the right under the international law to launch new airstrikes in Iraq. But the domestic authority for the U.S. airstrikes is much more murky, and, as Ilya Somin argues here, Congress might need to authorize continuing military action. Jack Goldsmith goes through the domestic legal bases...
I had the pleasure of doing a podcast yesterday with Mark Leon Goldberg, purveyor of the essential UN Dispatch website, on the possibility of Palestine ratifying the Rome Statute or accepting the Court's jurisdiction on an ad hoc basis. It's about 20 minutes long, and you can find it here (or on iTunes). I do want to mention another aspect of...
The ICC Office of the Prosecutor has just released the following statement: Palestine is not a State Party to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC; neither has the Court received any official document from Palestine indicating acceptance of ICC jurisdiction or requesting the Prosecutor to open an investigation into any alleged crimes following the November 2012 United Nations...
The request is supported by a number of leading QCs and professors in Britain. (Full disclosure: three of the signatories are barrister members and one is an academic member of Doughty Street Chambers, with which I'm associated.) Here is the Bar Human Rights Committee's summary: Public international law and criminal law Q.C.s and Professors based in Britain join with the Bar Human...
As Eugene notes in today's guest post, the Palestinian Authority (PA) appears to have decided to ratify the Rome Statute. I'll believe it when I see it: the PA has threatened to ratify before, only to back down at the last moment. But could it? Most observers have assumed it could, but Eugene disagrees. I think his bottom line may well be...
A few hours ago, the NY Times broke a story that the United States views Russian tests of a ground-launched missile as violating the 1987 INF treaty, formally (and lengthily) titled, "The Treaty Between The United States Of America And The Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics On The Elimination Of Their Intermediate-Range And Shorter-Range Missiles". According to the story, the State...
That's the question at the heart of a complicated debate between a variety of IHL scholars. The debate began with a legal opinion that Avi Bell submitted to the Knesset, in which he argued that nothing in international law prohibits Israel from cutting off the water and power it provides to Gaza. Although the opinion is dense -- and has been updated...
So I managed to anger lots of folks (mostly on twitter) with my post Friday (republished in the Diplomat and RealClearWorld yesterday) on the international legal problems created by any Japanese intervention to defend Taiwan from an attack by China. I don't mind angering people (especially on twitter), but I do want to make sure they are angry with me for...
Harry J. Kazianis, the managing editor of The National Interest, has a smart post discussing the risk that the U.S. is taking if it tries to take more aggressive action to counter China in the South China Sea. Essentially, he argues the U.S. has no effective strategy to counter China's "non-kinetic" strategy to subtly alter the status quo by using...
