I am back on the blog after some out-of-town travel and have been reading with great interest Roger Alford's dispatches from India. Welcome, Roger! I've also been catching up with developments this past week. On June 6, the ICC Chief Prosecutor announced that the ICC would officially open an investigation into the situation in Darfur. This comes after the Security...
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in his new book The World is Flat, argues that the global playing field is being leveled and that as a result the world is now flat. He argues that, “it is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on a more equal...
There have been numerous posts on Opinio Juris concerning how it may be time to reconsider the role of the ICJ. One recent comment to the blog and another “out in the real world” provide a good counterpoint to this whole discussion.Dr. Cesare Romano of NYU has posted an insightful comment to an earlier post on whether the ICJ needs...
According to the ILO, today in the world there are 20 million people (i.e., the population of Texas) who are currently in bonded labor. Bonded labor is a variation of forced labor that is little discussed and only vaguely understood by most Westerners. In its typical manifestation, bonded labor occurs when credit is advanced to an impoverished person and then...
I think you will get conflicting views on your question. My hunch is that as a general rule the lawyers litigating human rights cases in Indian courts are motivated by international human rights norms but typically will argue domestic law to the judges, with healthy reference to persuasive authority from English courts. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to...
Welcome Roger and thanks for starting us off this week with a great topic.IJM’s strategy is very interesting. While I don’t know of other groups applying litigation strategy exactly like IJM, I do note that U.S. civil rights groups have looked into ways in which human rights norms can affect U.S. litigation, even if you are not suing under...
Thank you Julian, Chris, and Peggy for the opportunity to guest blog this week with Opinio Juris. I am writing from Chennai (Madras) India, a south Indian city teeming with 4.2 million residents, a quarter of whom are slum dwellers. I spent most of my first day here touring the city by car, overwhelmed by the masses of...
OK, I'm not quite signing off yet. I just wanted to point readers to two more sharp (and in my mind, devastating) attacks on Amnesty International's attempt to equate Guantanamo with "gulags". (A comparison that they have not backed away from, as Jon Adler notes here). One is by Kenneth Anderson in the Weekly Standard, and the other...
Opinio Juris is thrilled to welcome Professor Roger Alford, of Pepperdine University School of Law, as a guest-blogger, filling in (mostly) for me while I travel and catch up on a few other projects. Roger will be posting from India, where he is currently travelling for the next two weeks. Roger is a well-known scholar of foreign relations and private...
The WSJ($) reports today on a draft Pentagon report on China's military power that suggests the Pentagon is re-focusing its energy on China as a possible military rival to the U.S. The report supposedly has been the subject of inter-agency struggles between the Pentagon, which wants to discuss possible global conflict scenarios, and the State Department, which doesn't want to...
I noted a while back that the Bush Administration is treating the Law of the Sea as essentially ratified, even asking for money to fund the Law of the Sea Tribunal. Yesterday, more evidence of the Bushies' love of the Law of the Sea Treaty has emerged, strangely enough, in the context of the ongoing Louisiana-Florida battle of underseas oil...
Legendary British military historian John Keegan weighs in with an insightful criticism of the effect of modern international law (and especially institutions like the International Criminal Court) on the ability of a military to operate effectively. Reviewing the upcoming prosecutions of UK soldiers in UK courts, and perhaps in the ICC, he writes:The United States has been much denounced...
