On Monday, I visited the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) here in Rome for a series of presentations on their legal offices and their current work (for an interesting take on a presentation we heard about the “right to food” check out my colleague David Hoffman’s views over at Concurring Opinions). Among the presentations, one struck me as...
It seems that in the first dozen years of the WTO there has been a tremendous amount of litigation about environmental protection and health measures. The key question in these cases often has been whether government action to advance such health and environmental concerns is consistent with WTO obligations. But what has been surprisingly absent from the WTO...
For better or for worse, Africa has become the leading testing ground for mechanisms of international criminal justice in this decade: e.g. Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Generally speaking, African opinion makers have seemed pretty supportive of such processes, but there are signs of a backlash brewing. Uganda: As this report from the Independent reminds us, the...
The CIA has declassified the “Family Jewels.” (Press release here.) Also known as the “Book of Skeletons,” this document was compiled in 1973 under Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, in the aftermath of the revelations from the Watergate investigation and other reports of CIA bad acts. Wanting to get a handle of the situation, of the skeletons in...
Sebastian Mallaby has an excellent essay in Monday’s Washington Post on a silent revolution in globalization. He writes:The next globalization battle lurks over the horizon, but you can already guess its contours. It will be shaped by two revolutions in finance and business: the growth of vast government-controlled investment funds abroad and the muddled progress toward shareholder democracy in...
Last year, Julian had written a post about a dispute between China and Japan over whether certain rocks in the ocean should be considered islands. If they are islands, then Japan would have a significantly larger Exclusive Economic Zone than had been previously recognized. To bolster the view that these are islands, not mere rocks, Japan has...
Brian Tamanaha over at Balkinization has responded to my post from last week, clarifying just why he thinks patriotism is so dangerous. His essential argument is that patriotism is not virtuous because politicians can abuse it in their desire for an inexorable march to war. He argues that "[s]ome good follows from patriotism, of course, but the bad...
That's what Thomas Geoghegan would like to see happen, as argued in this back-page piece in the latest issue of The American Prospect (teaser here). He argues that Kyoto, the Rome Statute, and human rights treaties should all get the NAFTA/WTO treatment, and that a Democrat president who looks to do things the old-fashioned way will be "looking straight...
The verdict has been delivered in the Anfal trial -- and not surprisingly, "Chemical Ali" and his highest-ranking co-defendants have been convicted and sentenced to death:Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and the former head of the Baath Party's Northern Bureau Command, earned his nickname for his alleged use of chemical weapons against the ethnic minority during efforts to crush a...
Though it didn't get much media play, the US Helsinki Commission held hearings yesterday on Guantanamo Bay. I don't think it was particularly notable on the substance, though Legal Adviser John Bellinger did allow that the Administration is "working to move to the day that Guantánamo could be closed." What's more interesting is the genealogy of the hearings....
My daily commute takes me from one edge of New York City to another edge. While sitting in traffic, it’s hard not to think about urban sprawl, congestion pricing, and so on. But, as recent news reports and scholarship have re-emphasized, the evolution of cities should be thought of not only as a purely local matter, but rather...
It's not every day that international law scholars show up on the Comedy Channel, but here's a clip of Anne-Marie Slaughter on the Colbert Report. (Thanks to Ed Swaine for the pointer.) Slaughter's new book, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World, appears to be getting more than the usual push...
