The Human Rights Committee has released an advance copy of its report on US compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. From a quick skim, it looks highly critical. (Just like the PR-insensitive UN to issue something newsworthy like this on a late summer Friday.) A predictable number of observations address GWOT detainee issues,...
I unwisely waded into a debate between Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review and Emily Bazelon of Slate over alleged mistakes and misrepresentations in Justice Stevens’ opinion for the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. As I pointed out earlier this week, Ponnuru charged that Justice Stevens mistakenly used legislative history in the Hamdan decision and that this was a...
I imagine John Gerard Ruggie knew he was throwing a bomb when he released his interim report on the Norms earlier this year. But perhaps that’s exactly what Kofi Annan had in mind in naming him as his Special Representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations. Approved by the UN Human Rights Commission in 2003,...
According to this website: "In 2002, 53 million people in the world lived in households in receipt of US$200 purchasing power parity (PPP) per day. Of these high earners, 58% lived in the United States. Western Europe and South America are also home to quite large populations of high earners. Within Western Europe the most very high earners live in...
The increasing intersection of IP [intellectual property] and human rights appears inevitable, and it will alter the shape and the trajectory of new legal rules in both camps. To understand the future of both IP and human rights law we must think systematically about how the rising density of the international system affects the process of rulemaking. At...
Not too many responses to my tepid call a few weeks back to beef up the international law offerings on this collective effort. There is now an entry for Abram Chayes (by Mark K. Jensen - it is possible to record one's authorship, on an entry's history page). I took it on myself to expand, however inadequately, the...
Eugene Volokh has a post over at the Conspiracy on the eligibility of foreign citizens to serve as judicial law clerks. As he notes, many are, so long as they hail from a country with which the U.S. has a defense treaty. I know of at least one instance of a non-citizen (from an EU state) clerking at...
In the case of Andersen v. King County, the Washington State Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the state's Defense of Marriage Act was not unconstitutional. The court’s majority opinion and the concurring and dissenting opinions are available here. I just wanted to offer a quick comment about comparativism. It is noteworthy that the court embraces living constitutionalism,...
As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the issues that Russia did not want discussed at the G-8 summit was the status of the “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union. I have spent the last year and a half researching and writing a report for the New York City Bar on one such conflict in Moldova....
According to the UK's Guardian, families of UK soldiers killed in Iraq will be permitted to bring an action in UK courts challenging the legality of the U.S./U.K. led war in Iraq. I don't have a copy of the ruling, but apparently, the UK soldiers' relatives will bring a lawsuit alleging violation of the right to life guaranteed by...
The Truman National Security Project appears to have assembled a remarkably well-credentialed network of young (as in 20- and 30-something) foreign policy experts to devise an alternative among Democrats to neocons on the one hand (to the extent that any remain Democrat) and Vietnam-era leftists on the other. The group articulates a foreign-policy vision that couples strength, including the...
The New York Times is reporting that under the proposed changes to the military commissions, hearsay evidence may be admitted in criminal prosecution of detainees. It seems the article paints a picture of this being a problem under Hamdan. Here is an excerpt from the article: Legislation drafted by the Bush administration setting out new rules on bringing terror...
