It will not come as a surprise to regular readers that I am appalled by Libya's detention of Melinda Taylor, a lawyer with the ICC's Office of Public Counsel for the Defence, and her translator. There is no evidence that Taylor has done anything wrong; indeed, as Mark Kersten notes, it seems eminently possible that her detention is simply a...
[Steven Groves is a Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C.] Many thanks to Julian Ku for inviting me to participate in this UNCLOS debate on one of my favorite websites. There is much I agree with in the posts of Professors Kraska, Noyes, and Allen. Professor Kraska correctly emphasizes the victory achieved by U.S. negotiators at UNCLOS...
I wanted to thank Professors Allen, Kraska, and Noyes for their contributions to our discussion on US ratification of UNCLOS. I've learned a great deal from their posts and I hope our readers have as well. I wanted to remind our readers, however, that we will hear from two leading scholars tomorrow -- Jeremy Rabkin and Steven Groves -- who...
[John E. Noyes is the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at California Western School of Law.] The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee is currently holding hearings on U.S. acceptance of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, as modified by the 1994 Part XI Implementation Agreement (the “LOS Convention”). The Committee favorably reported the LOS Convention in 2004...
[Dr. James Kraska, Commander, U.S. Navy, is the Howard S. Levie Chair of Operational Law at the U.S. Naval War College]. Thanks for the opportunity to talk a bit about the major national security and strategic interests of the United States in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It is also a pleasure to exchange thoughts on the...
[Craig H. Allen is the Judson Falknor Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle.] I would like to begin by thanking Opinio Juris for hosting this timely and important debate on the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) and Julian Ku in particular for inviting me to participate. My small contribution begins with two...
From the first class I ever took on international law, I've heard (mostly negative) references to the U.S. refusal to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. I've heard again and again throughout my studies about how the U.S. was shirking its global responsibilities as well as how the U.S. was hurting its own national interests by...
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has an op-ed in the WSJ announcing his opposition to US ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The op-ed is probably meant to soften the force of an earlier WSJ op-ed by former Republican Secretaries of State calling for US ratification. He is also testifying on Thursday at...
The Office of the Prosecutor has filed its response to Libya's challenge to the admissibility of the cases against Saif Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi. There are a number of interesting aspects to the response. First, it says nothing about the case of al-Senussi. That's a curious omission, given that the response specifically points out with regard to Saif (para. 41)...
This past Monday, my Taming Globalization co-author John Yoo and I hosted a number of scholars at an American Enterprise Institute conference to discuss the impact of globalization on U.S. sovereignty. We were fortunate to have the participation of smart and interesting scholars like Tom Lee of Fordham Law, Tai-heng Cheng of New York Law School and Quinn Emanuel, our own Peter...
So reports The Guardian: Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, has been sentenced to 50 years in jail for being "in a class of his own" when committing war crimes during the long-running civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Judges at a UN-backed tribunal in The Hague said his leadership role and exploitation of the conflict to extract so-called "blood diamonds" meant he...
Readers will recall that I followed the progress of my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals on the blog, from proposal to finished project. I received a great deal of positive feedback on those posts, as well as some very useful feedback on the project itself. (Also a couple of complaints that I was just being narcissistic, but you can't...
