Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has appealed to the UN Security Council to take action on Syria which he said is "breaking up before everyone's eyes". Meanwhile, there are reports of a new massacre in Aleppo as more than 71 bodies were found by a river. Israel has boycotted the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review of the rights situation in Israel, which has left the body with...
[Alexander Wills is an LLM student at Leiden University] Kevin’s earlier posts (here, here and here), and the robust discussion they provoked, centred on two key questions: Can Article 12(3) declarations can have effect retroactively; and Can State Parties lodge declarations under Article 12(3)? I don’t propose to repeat the points Kevin made earlier, but to briefly provide some additional material suggesting an affirmative...
[Başak Çalı is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Rights at the University College London] This post is the third in a series of three. In my previous post, I reviewed the Von Hannover (2) and Fatullayev cases to illustrate my argument that the standard of judicial review used by the European Court of Human Rights is variable. Notably, the Strasbourg Court chooses to employ a...
Michael Lewis claims, in his very interesting post, that "it is fair to say that if Israel’s action in the 1967 war was justified by Article 51 (something that most states, if not most scholars, seem to agree with), then Article 51 'imminence' is broader than Caroline 'imminence'." I don't have time today to address that claim in any detail, but I...
After reviewing the comments from my last post expressing general dissatisfaction with the chart showing the legal systems of the world, I decided to do a little more research to find a more accurate chart. Fortunately, those efforts paid off in spades, with a series of wonderful charts produced by the University of Ottawa. As you can see,...
Perhaps some OJ readers caught this abstract from the SSRN public international law postings this week, but if you didn't, I want to commend it to you: Eyal Benvenisti and Amichai Cohen, "War as Governance: Explaining the Logic of the Laws of War from a Principal-Agent Perspective." I have read it once, and plan to re-read it; I've long followed...
[Michael Lewis is a Professor at Ohio Northern University’s Petit College of Law and a former F-14 pilot for the US Navy.] Peter Margulies’s recent posts here at Opinio Juris and over at Lawfare broadly covered the issues raised and discussed at the Boundaries of the Battlefield symposium recently hosted by the Asser Institute at the Hague. I just wanted to...
Rep. Edward Royce, Chairman of the US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, has urged China to participate in the arbitration proceedings lodged by the Philippines over their dispute regarding the South China Sea. The US military has started preparations for a drone base in Western Africa, presumably in Niger or in Burkina Faso. A judge in Guatemala has ordered Mr Rios Montt, a former dictator and...
McClatchy reports that Israel now believes Iran will not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015 or 2016. That is progress of a sort; Netanyahu had previously been claiming that Iran would have the bomb no later than late summer 2013 -- around six months from now. But Israel is still insisting that Iran is only two or...
In case you ever wanted a snapshot of the legal systems of the world, this handy chart is worth a look. If you follow the link you can get a brief explanation of the legal system of each country, including the historical roots. The orange is common law, the blue civil law, the green mixed, and the red...
Talks have broken down at the African Union summit in Ethiopia on plans to solve the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.The UN wants to set up an intervention force to fight rebels fueling conflict in the DRC, according to a UN official.According to B’Tselem, a rights group, Israel is breaking its own rules of engagement by using deadly...
For those of you wondering how seriously the Chinese media is taking the Philippines' arbitration claim against China over the South China Sea (there must be at least two of you out there), here is an illustrative cartoon from a Chinese newspaper, "JingChu Times", in Central China (although originally from another publication). Although one doesn't need to read Chinese to get...
