In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Organizations

06 Dec

[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor, The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS. She attended ICC ASP 14 on behalf of the American NGO Coalition for the ICC and the American Branch of the International Law Association International Criminal Court Committee. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of AMICC or the ABILA.] From November 18-27, delegates of states that are parties...

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06 Dec

We wanted to pass along a quick update from our friends at the UN Office of Legal Affairs who continue to build out an on-line international law research portal that can hopefully have lasting impact: The Codification Division of the UN Office of Legal Affairs recently added new lectures to the UN Audiovisual Library of International Law website, which provides high quality international...

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03 Dec

I can't resist one final post to complete an earlier discussion between myself and professors Bruce Ackerman and David Golove on the legal status of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal.  As several others in the blogosphere have noted, the U.S. State Department has confirmed, in a letter to Congress, the following: The...

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30 Nov

[Dan Bodansky is the Foundation Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. He will be in Paris for the climate change negotiations. This is the first in a series of updates both from the U.S. and from Paris. Professor Bodansky has...

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25 Nov

Last week, the U.S. Congress passed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 (or the "Space Act"), which will authorize private U.S. companies to own and sell resources they extract from objects in space. Supporters (and detractors) are calling this historic, because it is the first time the U.S. government has plainly authorized commercial exploitation of outer space...

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18 Nov

I had the honor and pleasure of testifying today before the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.  The topic of the hearing was "Examining International Climate Negotiations" and the upcoming conference in Paris. My own contribution argued that an agreement with legally binding emissions reduction obligations should be submitted to the Senate as a treaty rather than as a...

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17 Nov

As I was researching a new essay on complementarity, I stumbled across a fantastic article in the Chinese Journal of International Law by Paidrag McAuliffe, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool School of Law. Here is the abstract of the article, which is entitled "From Watchdog to Workhorse: Explaining the Emergence of the ICC's Burden-sharing Policy as an Example of...

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16 Nov

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy has suggested that if NATO invokes Article V's collective self-defense language against ISIS as a result of the terrible Paris attacks over the weekend, President Obama's ongoing use of military force against ISIS could be "legalized" as a matter of U.S. constitutional law.  Here is Ilya: Article 5 provides a much stronger justification for the war...

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13 Nov

It was only a matter of time before the far right began to attack Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) for being in league with the Taliban -- and thus implicitly (nudge nudge, wink wink) the actual party responsible for the US's notorious assault on its hospital in Kunduz. And the attack has now begun. Here is a snippet from an article today in the Daily Caller: International...

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06 Nov

In my post on biological and chemical weapons yesterday, I rejected the idea that Art. 8(2)(b)(xviii) "squarely appl[ies]" (Ralf Trapp) or "plainly applies" (Alex Whiting) to chemical and biological weapons by arguing that the drafters of the Rome Statute intended Art. 8(2)(b)(xviii), the war crime of “[e]mploying asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases,” to have precisely the kind of "special meaning" that Art. 31(4) of...

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27 Oct

I  have finally made my way through the OTP's 162-page request to open an investigation into the situation in Georgia. I hope to write a few posts in the coming days on various aspects of the request; in this post I simply want to note my surprise that the OTP has not alleged that Georgia is responsible for two interrelated war crimes:...

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