Although the U.S. has signed the Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.S. Senate has not yet ratified it and substantial conservative opposition to the treaty continues to loom (as I noted here). Interestingly, the Bush Administration is seeking congressional appropriations for the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Seabed Disputes Chamber of that Tribunal,...
While we are thinking about U.N. reform, maybe we should think about reforming or even gutting the U.N.'s chief judicial organ: the International Court of Justice.The ICJ announced this week that it has undertaken certain re-shuffling of its chambers. This appears to be pretty minor stuff (I never even knew they had a chamber for "summary procedure"), but it does...
Ken Anderson has a series of posts on UN reform here that are well worth reading and considering. (Kofi Annan lays out his "in Larger Freedom" agenda in the current Foreign Affairs here.) I plan to post some thoughts of my own later....
In a little noticed vote, the U.S. defeated a resolution (8-22) that would have required the U.N. Human Rights Commission to request the U.S. government establish and impartial and independent fact-finding investigation into the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay (an account of the vote can be found here at the bottom of the release). China, Cuba, Sudan, and Zimbabwe...
Committee II of the Eleventh United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice held a workshop yesterday to review the international anti-terrorist legal framework. As I've discussed here and here, this is a surprisingly underdeveloped area of international law given the fairly widespread consensus on the subject among most states....
Columbia University's American Constitution Society hosted a discussion between Professors John Yoo (a leading constitutional and foreign relations scholar) and Jeremy Waldron (a distinguished Kantian legal philosopher) on legal aspects of the war on terrorism today, especially torture. As usual, tireless bloggers from Ex Post have "liveblogged" the debate here.Here are some of the highlights. The hardest question for Professor...
I plan to post quite a bit more on the continuing China-Japan row later this week, but I couldn't resist passing along these remarkable pictures from a Chinese "BBS" list with pictures of the some recent anti-Japanese protests in Shanghai. Just keep scrolling down, even if you don't read Chinese, you should easily get a sense of the rather...
I have held back from blogging on the Bolton nomination in part because we learned precious little (as Julian noted here) at his confirmation hearing about what, precisely, Bush II plans to do at, with, or through the United Nations. I think there is plenty in Bolton's prior writings and statements to demonstrate that he is a bad fit for...
Readers of this blog might be interested in this radio debate between Prof. Jack Goldsmith of Harvard and Judge Christopher Weeramantry, a former ICJ judge, on WBUR-Radio in Boston....
Adolfo Scilingo, a former Argentine Naval officer, was convicted by a Spanish court for crimes against humanity. This is the first such conviction under universal jurisdicition is Spain (that is, at issue here is not any croime against Spansih citizens or against the laws of Spain, per se, but rather acts that any country should be able to prosecute...
This report gives a bit more detail to the non-agreement agreement between the ICC Prosecutor and the Ugandan leaders who visited the Hague last week. The statements by the ICC Prosecutor shows the limits of his discretion under the ICC Statute and, perhaps, why the ICC will always be a potential obstacle to settlement of an ongoing conflict. The ICC...
In a piece of terrible timing, the Tokyo High Court has denied the appeal of a group of 10 Chinese plaintiffs seeking compensation for Japanese WWII atrocities. This decision comes just as the Japanese Foreign Minister left China without having resolved rising tensions and as the stocks of Japanese companies doing business in China plummet. Although I can't...
