Last year, as I was reading an early draft of the agenda for the ICC's Review Conference in 2010, I asked myself what I would change about the Rome Statute if I was King of the Assembly of States Parties. My answer was that I would amend Article 17, the complementarity provision, to make a case admissible if a national...
The Trial Chamber has -- completely unsurprisingly -- rejected Dr. Karadzic's motion challenging Richard Harvey's appointment as stand-by counsel. As I explained in a previous post, that challenge was based on three grounds: (1) Harvey's appointment violates Article 21(4) of the ICTY Statute, which provides that a defendant has the right “to communicate with counsel of his own choosing” and...
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...
[caption id="attachment_10843" align="alignnone" width="300" caption=""][/caption](Cross posted on Smith School of Enterprise and Environment) Copenhagen, December 19 – The Copenhagen conference limped to a finish mid-day Saturday after “working” throughout the night. These all night sessions on the closing day are becoming a COP ritual, with people spending most of their time waiting around the conference room while small huddles...
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 one thing that has become abundantly clear this week at Copenhagen is that there is very distinct lack of trust between developed and developing countries. This came to a head on Monday with the walkout of some of the G77 countries as they believed that developed countries were attempting to scrap the Kyoto Protocol. A critical element in building trust...
[Professor Dan Bodansky is continuing his dispatches from the climate change talks. This post is cross-posted at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford.] Copenhagen, December 17 – With the hours counting down to the end of the Copenhagen conference, real substantive negotiations have yet to begin. Instead, the focus has been almost exclusively on procedure. All...
Monday, December 14 – The climate negotiations ground to a halt for much of today, as negotiators debated the organization of work for the second and final week of the meeting. The ostensible cause of the breakdown was concern among (some?) developing countries that the Kyoto Protocol (KP) track in the negotiations is moving more slowly, and getting less...
Here in Copenhagen, agreeing on some principles of climate finance, at least in very basic form, is at last becoming a priority. Last week, after announcing EU money for a climate change fast start fund, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that developing countries would only enter into a climate agreement if sufficient money was committed by developed countries: “This is...
As the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen enters its crucial week, we will be joined by a few guests who will be blogging about the climate talks, sometimes from Copenhagen itself. Dan Bodansky of the University of Georgia (and soon to be of Arizona State University) and the author of the book The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law has already...
President Obama's Nobel Prize speech yesterday made reference to the moral authority, under the ethics of the just war, for armed humanitarian intervention in some situations. It is a topic that has been debated and discussed as a matter of international law for, well, a long time, but which gained particular urgency following on Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo in the...
The Guardian has a leaked copy of what it's calling "the Danish text" (see it here). Apparently, this draft was developed by the Danes along with other developed countries including the United States and the United Kingdom in the hope that it might become the basis for whatever instrument emerges from Copenhagen. As widely expected, the instrument is framed as a "political agreement"...
