The International Crisis Group has a new report on the risk of widespread violence in the Niger Delta called “The Swamps of Insurgency: Nigeria’s Delta Unrest.” The executive summary and full report download are available here. Following is a short description from the ICG:The Nigerian government and international oil corporations must change direction if they are to reduce...
Who knew that a single treaty-provision could get so much attention? Well, post-Hamdan, we’ve certainly seen a lot of discussion of whether the Supreme Court was correct to view Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions as applicable to the President’s military commissions. And, the debate continues as Congress weighs whether and how to accept the Supreme...
Following up on my earlier posts on the separatist crisis in Moldova (see chain of links below), here is my summary of the legal issues that we considered in preparing the NY City Bar’s report on the on the Transnistrian conflict. While a blog post can’t go into great detail due to length, I hope this may at least set...
As Julian noted Monday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have announced an agreement on collaboration in the fight against global warming. The text of what was agreed can be found here. It’s titled, “United Kingdom and California Announcement on Climate Change and Clean Energy Cooperation,” followed by a mission statement in which California (CA) and...
My vote for the most important international law case for the month of July is Azurix v. Argentina. The decision is available here and nice summaries of the decision can be found here, here, and here. This ICSID arbitration is, at its essence, a case about water politics. Or as the locals might say, una problema de agua mala en...
So suggests an Irish parliamentarian in the Irish Times (text available here). I don't think so, for two reasons. First, law in any form is going to be uneven in its coverage. Gerald Neuman had a wonderful 1996 piece in the Stanford Law Review entitled "Anomalous Zones," about the geographically and temporally discontinuous application of the law. ...
Today will be Peter Spiro's final day guest-blogging. On behalf of all of us, I want to thank him for his stint -- which was, by any account, a smashing success. We wish him well in his new position at Temple! ...
For years, researching U.S. treaty-making was a daunting task. Publication of U.S. treaties and other international agreements in the United States Treaties (UST) and Treaties and Other International Agreements (TIAS) series lagged years (if not decades) behind. Other materials (e.g., reservations, instruments of ratification, the travaux preparatoire) were often unavailable, incomplete, or required checking multiple sources. And...
After leaving the White House this week during his consultations with President Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair met with California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce an agreement to start a global-warming-reducing emissions-trading market. Wait a minute, even though California often seems like a foreign country to many of us in the States, can California actually sign an agreement with a...
An Old Bailey judge involved in the Official Secrets Act prosecution of Leo O'Connor and David Keogh ruled on July 18th that the public cannot learn the contents of the infamous leaked document detailing a conversation between Bush and Blair in which Bush allegedly expressed his desire to bomb al-Jazeera's headquarters in Iraq: Any discussion of an already partially leaked...
For those who are interested, Steve Clemons of The Washington Note is actively covering John Bolton's confirmation hearings. If Clemons' first few posts are any indication, things aren't going very well for the nominee, whose disastrous interim stint at the UN seems to be rightfully coming back to haunt him:1. Senator Hagel is now undecided on whether to support...
This article in the New York Times by Thom Shanker raises a critically important question for the current conflict in the Middle East. Shanker writes, Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning,...
