In a previous post, I noted that Peter Berkowitz defended the legality of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program by invoking U.S. practice -- and only U.S. practice. He now has offered another defense of such an attack in response to an editorial by Bruce Ackerman in the L.A Times. Unfortunately, Berkowitz's second article is...
Americans are furious. Officials are out of touch with the rest of us. If we thought about it, we should be angry that officials do not take international law more seriously. That is just another way that the people we send to Washington do not understand what we really need. American workers whose retirement funds hold GM stock should want to...
[Claude Bruderlein is the director of the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research] The deteriorating security situation in Syria has had dramatic consequences on the civilian population. While the international community debates different ways to respond to the violence against civilians and the rising humanitarian needs, a growing tension has emerged around the means and methods to provide...
I am teaching IHL in Jericho this week, so I don't have as much time as I'd like to weigh in on the increasingly surreal debate over whether the right of self-defense in Article 51 of the UN Charter permits the U.S. or Israel to attack a country that does not have nuclear weapons, could not build a nuclear weapon...
I expect the legal issues arising out of a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities are going to get hotter in the coming weeks. Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution offers this argument in favor of the legality of Israel's attack drawing from the doctrine of "preemptive" self defense (h/t Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare). The charter of the United Nations affirms...
The ABA Journal has a cover story about the threat posed to island states by climate change. This is a topic we have discussed on Opinio Juris at various times. Duncan wrote at length about the Maldives; I had a shorter piece here, and there are various references in the midst of other blog posts. The Journal article is long and...
It won't save his job, for reasons Julian mentioned a week or so ago, but it's still good news: Spain's top court acquitted renowned judge Baltasar Garzon on Monday of abuse of power by trying to investigate Franco-era atrocities, in a case that exposed deep wounds dating back to the civil war. Six members of the seven-strong Supreme Court...
If you are around Washington DC this week on Wednesday and Thursday, you might want to (advance) register and attend a major human rights conference at my school, Washington College of Law, American University, "Forensic Evidence in the Fight Against Torture." My law school's dean, Claudio Grossman, is a major figure in UN and regional human rights bodies, and is...
[The following is a guest post by Dan Joyner, Professor of Law at the University of Alabama. Our thanks to him for contributing it.] So, as you probably guessed from the title of this post, it’s going to be a bit of a rant. But this has been festering inside me for the past five years and I want to get...
My friend Dapo Akande takes me to task today at EJIL: Talk! for my position on drone strikes directed at combatants attending a funeral or helping the wounded. I will address his curious reluctance to address the text of the Rome Statute in Part II of my response; in this post, I want to address his arguments concerning IHL. Here...
That's the conclusion drawn in this blockbuster report -- which, precisely because it is a blockbuster that makes Israel and the MEK's vast number of Democratic and Republican supporters in the U.S. look bad, has been basically ignored in the "liberal" media: Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed,...
Cross-posted at LieberCode. It is becoming increasingly likely that Russia and China are going to block just about any resolution on Syria coming out of the Security Council, regardless of whether it is meaningful or not. They aren’t going to support a resolution that seriously denounces the regime, nor are they going to support an ICC...
