NGO Monitor loves to criticize progressive NGOs for a lack of transparency concerning their funding. A recent report, for example, predictably attacks Human Rights Watch for not identifying all of its donors, particularly those at last year's fundraising event in Saudi Arabia: HRW publishes the names and amounts provided by some of its donors, but others remain hidden. Although HRW...
Yesterday's oral argument in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd gave strong indications that the Court was prepared to extend the territorial limitations of Hoffman-La Rouche v. Empagran to the securities fraud context. Morrison involves a class action brought by foreign plaintiffs against a foreign stock issuer on a foreign exchange for alleged fraud that occurred on foreign soil....
Every time that I teach international criminal law, at least one student writes on whether you could prosecute the Burmese junta for crimes against humanity. As a matter of substantive ICL, the answer is clearly yes. The problem is jurisdictional -- who is going to prosecute them? Apparently, the UK thinks it should be the ICC via a Security Council...
Today's Financial Times has a story on how unhappy U.S. businesses have become about Chinese government restrictions interfering with their access to Chinese markets. So, one can understand how U.S. exporters would welcome news that the United States and China are getting closer to including a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). And, let's be clear, this would be the mother-of-all BITs, given...
Japan triumphs in a big way at the CITES meeting in Doha, as the U.S. proposed ban on bluefin tuna trade goes down 20-68. The rejection of the bluefin proposal was a clear victory for the Japanese government, which had vowed to go all out to stop the measure or else exempt itself from complying with it. Japan, which consumes nearly...
I am not a huge fan of restrictive and protectionist trade policy, but I can't offer any serious legal quarrel with the recently proposed Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act by the growing anti-trade bloc in the U.S. Congress. As Lori Wallach from Public Citizen notes, the Act offers a radically new approach to U.S. trade policy. The Act explicitly...
Sure there is some dispute about settlements in East Jerusalem, or something, but here are some international law disputes that really matter. At CoP15, or the 15th Meeting of the Parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species - currently going on in Doha, parties are discussing: resuming (or not resuming) the trade in ivory and imposing a...
The general consensus among comments to my post last week on the previously-unacknowledged U.S.-Japanese security agreements was "no big deal." These pacts reinforce an already well-developed practice of states doing deals--whether legally binding or political commitments--without U.N. registration or public disclosure. Similarly, they reinforce existing views of Executive authority to conclude sole-executive agreements on defense-related matters for the United States. So, if everyone's OK with such...
Here is another persuasive account of why the U.S. is disadvantaged by not joining the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The case is fairly simple: There is a lot of oil and natural gas up there, and the U.S. can't negotiate with other countries to divvy it up until it signs on to UNCLOS. The 5.5 million-square-mile area...
The following is a guest post by Lt. Col. Chris Jenks, the Chief of the International Law Branch in the U.S. Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General. Lt. Col. Jenks is posting in his personal capacity. On March 8th, the Supreme Court "invited" the Solicitor General to file a brief in Carmichael v. Kellogg, Brown & Root...
In the long-running battle between Chevron and Ecuador over environmental damage, a federal court in New York has denied Ecuador's motion to stay arbitration of a Ecuador-U.S. BIT claim. In September 2009, Chevron filed a notice of arbitration alleging, among other things, that "Ecuador has breached ...
It is always unpleasant to get lectured by foreign governments about "violating international law", but this is something U.S. government officials should be used to. Still, it must be galling for the new U.S. administration to be lectured by Brazil's president over U.S. non-compliance with a WTO ruling on cotton subsidies. The United States must comply with a World Trade Organization...
