On Monday, my friend Beth van Schaack posted an excellent analysis at Just Security of the Syria War Crimes Accountability Act of 2017, a bipartisan Senate bill "[t]o require a report on, and to authorize technical assistance for, accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Syria." Beth summarises the most important aspects of the bill; in this...
Over the past couple of years, a number of scholars -- including me -- have debated whether IHL implicitly authorises detention in non-international armed conflict (NIAC.) The latest important intervention in the debate comes courtesy of Daragh Murray in the Leiden Journal of International Law. As the article's abstract makes clear, Murray is firmly in the "IHL authorises" camp: On the basis of...
Last week, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) sent shockwaves through the international community by issuing a report that -- for the first time in UN history -- claims Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to the crime of apartheid. Here is ESCWA's description of the report, entitled “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,"...
As has been widely reported, 17 international-law scholars -- including yours truly -- recently submitted a 105-page communication to the Office of the Prosecutor alleging that Australia's treatment of refugees involves the commission of multiple crimes against humanity, including imprisonment, torture, deportation, and persecution. The communication is a tremendous piece of work, prepared in large part by the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and...
Finally, a Republican bill we can all get behind! The American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2017: A bill was introduced to the House of Representatives in early January that, among other things, calls for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. Sponsored by Senator Mike Rogers, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (aka H.R. 193) had been previously introduced by the...
The forthcoming issue of the European Journal of International Law will feature an article by Professor Simon Chesterman, the Dean of the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law, entitled Asia’s Ambivalence About International Law and Institutions: Past, Present and Futures. This week, Opinio Juris and EJILTalk will hold a joint symposium on the two blogs on Professor Chesterman’s article. The...
The inestimable Ryan Goodman has a new post at Just Security listing all the times the Saudis denied using cluster munitions in Yemen. As Ryan points out, we now know that those denials were what I like to call "shameless lies" (emphasis in original): On Monday, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon told the House of Commons that following the UK’s own analysis,...
PassBlue published a very disturbing article yesterday about nominations for five vacant UN Special Rapporteur positions. According to the article, although the President of the Human Rights Council, South Korea's Choi Kyonglim, has endorsed four of the selection committee's five first choices, he has refused to endorse its first choice for Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Karim...
There are lots of important issues implicated by this morning's above-the-fold story in the New York Times that U.S. officials and certain cybersecurity experts (e.g., Crowdstrike) have concluded Russian government agencies bear responsibility for hacking the Democratic National Committee's servers and leaking internal e-mails stored on them to Wikileaks (Russian responsibility for the hack itself was alleged more than a month ago)....
[Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University and a permanent visiting professor at iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen.] As the world reacts to the shock of the Brexit referendum, international lawyers are turning their attention to the mechanics of Britain’s departure from the EU. Article 50 of...
We at Opinio Juris are very proud that our colleague Duncan Hollis of Temple University Law School was elected on June 15 by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States to the Inter-American Juridical Committee, which ...
I thought I had largely said what I had to say concerning emojis and international law in my previous post. SRSLY. ;-) But then John Louth, who knows of my interest in issues of recognition and non-recognition of aspirant states, pointed out this article from Wired which discusses, among other things, the issue of which national flags are awarded emoji and...
