As my new colleague Peter Spiro has already noted, this morning the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings to discuss how Congress should respond to last week’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and its invalidation of the Bush Administration’s military commissions program. Ironically, this afternoon, the Committee will get a chance to hear from one of the architects of that...
As Marty Lederman predicted, those memos are being written. The FT is reporting that in the wake of Hamdan, the Pentagon has deemed Common Article 3 to apply to all detainees in U.S. custody. The timing is key, as it should signal to Congress that the Administration isn't interested in legislation overriding US obligations under the Geneva Conventions. In...
A federal district court in Nevada last week issued an interesting international environmental law decision that is worthy of note. The case is Consejo de Desarrollo Economico de Mexicali v. United States, 2006 WL 1875380, and is not available online. Quick facts: A canal known as the All-American Canal provides a route for the delivery of water from the Colorado...
I don't know whether Wikipedia is the way of the future, especially in the academic and public policy worlds (hence the tentativeness), but Peter Lattman's post last week about the evolution of Ken Lay's entry after his death (very incidentally) got me checking how international law fares in the collective effort. Not very well, it turns out. Although...
The Eastern District of New York issued an important decision last week in the case of Stutts v. De Dietrich Group, 2006 WL 1867060. The decision is not available online, although the original complaint is available here. The Court held that the Geneva Convention of 1925 is not self-executing and that the relevant U.N. Security Council Resolutions do...
From July 15 to 17 the leaders of the Group of Eight will meet in St. Petersburg, Russia for the Group's yearly summit. The G-8 began in 1975 as the G-6—the U.S., the U.K, France, Italy, West Germany and Japan—the six largest market economies meeting in the midst of the economic turmoil of the 1970’s. The group became...
The NYT has a useful account of the brewing debate in Congress over how to respond to the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. According to the article, Congress may spend the rest of the summer dealing with this. Here are some of the options: (1) A one-sentence statute repealing Hamdan's interpretation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, essentially completely restoring...
I used to think that ICJ advisory opinions, like the July 9, 2004 ICJ opinion finding Israel's separation wall a violation of international law, didn't have much legal significance. But maybe I'm wrong. The ICJ opinion does open up a new avenue to pressure the Israeli Government - sue or boycott corporations for complicity in Israel's alleged human...
As was widely reported in the media, Khamis al-Obeidi, a defense attorney for Saddam and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim, was murdered two weeks ago. Al-Obeidi is the third defense attorney to be killed during the trial. Human Rights Watch has released a statement regarding the need to protect defense counsel — current and future — appearing before the Iraqi High...
I noted last week that the special prosecutor investigating past government abuses in Mexico, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, had finally succeeding in indicting former president Luis Echeverria on genocide charges. His success was short-lived: a judge dismissed the charges yesterday on the ground that they violated Mexico's statute of limitations for genocide. This latest setback for the special prosecutor is...
It’s no secret that the Bush Administration has little love for treaties, and I’d expect the Supreme Court’s recent pronouncements will do little to improve that outlook. Still, it’s worth recalling that the Bush Administration does not view all treaties as fatally flawed. There are a few (increasingly rare?) exceptions. For example, on Wednesday the United States and Switzerland became...
Volokh Conspiracy contributor David Kopel has a provocative op-ed in the WSJ($) today alleging that, despite their denials, the U.N.-sponsored Small Arms Conference really does want to ban all guns. The U.N. has long urged that firearms must never be transferred to "non-state actors" -- that is, entities which are neither governments nor government-approved. Only John Bolton's intransigence prevented the...
