As Roger noted, the EU presidency recently sent a public letter to the governor of Texas asking him to declare a moratorium on executions in his state. Texas governor Rick Perry sent a rather tart reply, which can be boiled down to: "Buzz off!". On the other hand, he did commute the death sentence of one convict yesterday,...
Well, sort of. Here's a snippet from ABC News:United Nations weapons inspectors discovered six to eight vials of a dangerous chemical warfare agent, phosgene, as they were cleaning out offices at a U.N. building in New York, federal authorities tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The federal authorities said the office, in a U.N. building near headquarters, was being evacuated and the...
Human Rights Watch yesterday issued a 128-page report entitled "Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah's Rocket Attacks on Israel in 2006 War." The full report is here and the press release is here. Here is an excerpt: During the 2006 war, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately and at times deliberately at civilian areas in northern Israel, killing at least...
Rodrigo de Rato - Managing Director of the IMF announced he would resign earlier this summer. How should his successor be chosen? By convention, merit, or a mix of both? The established convention is that the Managing Director of the IMF is European, and the First Deputy Managing Director is American. (By comparison, the head of the...
In a new essay at Jurist, Jordan Paust concludes "probably." Check it out and let us know what you think. ...
That’s an argument that my colleague and friend, Craig Green, here at Temple is making with his work, Repressing Erie’s Myth, which will appear in the California Law Review next year (you can download a copy of it in draft form here). For years, the conventional wisdom suggested that customary international law operated as part of U.S. federal common...
In a rare interview with Western journalists, Ugandan rebel leader Vincent Otti, one of four individuals named in an ICC arrest warrant, accuses the ICC of hypocrisy for failing to pursue Ugandan government officials for war crimes. This is not really a surprising argument and Otti is hardly a credible accuser. Indeed, he does not appear to know the...
Over at NPR's Justice Talking blog, I have a post trying to tie together some ideas relating to Fourth Generation Warfare and the rule of law. Here's the opening:One of the tropes of the current Administration is that the Global War on Terror is a new kind of war and a new kind of war needs new rules. This has...
Post-conflict reconstruction strategies today emphasize economic reconstruction measures as a matter of course. Measures have included commercial law reform to attract FDI, natural resource management, and the issuance of new currencies. This emphasis on the economic dimensions of peace maintenance draws from research by Paul Collier and others showing that states with higher levels of economic growth are...
With the new academic year upon us, I thought it might be useful to update you on all new and lateral international law professor hires. If I have missed anyone, or made any errors in description, please email me or add a comment to the post. Special thanks to our Opinio Juris intern Louis Froelich for his assistance. Lateral...
Info Ops or “IO” has been a hot topic of late. In April and May 2007, Estonia claimed to have become the first victim of cyberwar, as denial of service attacks on its computer networks, disabled not just government websites, but those of its banks, universities, telecommunication companies, and hospitals. Estonia blamed the attacks on the Russian government,...
Thank you for this opportunity to guest blog on Opinio Juris. I would like to start with some comments on post-conflict reconstruction - an issue that now tops the UN's security agenda, and is one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the US. In less than 2 decades, multilateral intervention in post conflict zones has shifted from short...
