This is a tough loss for the human rights advocacy community, ending an era that began with the Second Circuit's rediscovery of the Alien Tort Statute in its 1980 decision in Filartiga v. Pena. As Julian highlights below, Justice Kennedy may have left the door ajar to future claims, but only barely. Even Breyer's concurrence -- the rejection of the...
Would've been helpful if he'd said a wee bit more. For now, we'll have to comb through the majority opinion in search of the questions he has in mind. In the meantime, worth noting the Court was 9-0 in affirming the Second Circuit's decision to dismiss the ATS complaint in this case. JUSTICE KENNEDY, concurring. The opinion for the Court is careful...
Yesterday, the ICJ reached its judgment in the frontier dispute between Burkina Faso and Niger. The BBC has more here. According to a bipartisan report by the Constitution Project (.pdf), the US has engaged in torture at the highest levels. Human Rights Watch also offers a statement here. The New Zealand parliament has passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Privacy International has sued the United...
Oral arguments began yesterday at the ICJ in the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute about land surrounding the Temple Vihear, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Syrian warplanes have launched further attacks in Damascus in addition to a handful of other rebel-held Syrian cities. Heads of the World Health Organization and UNICEF made a rare political plea to the international community yesterday stating that intervention...
As North Korea celebrated the 101st birthday of the country's founder, the US has said it is ready to "reach out" if Pyongyang gives up its nuclear aspirations after warning North Korea that a nuclear missile launch would be a "huge mistake." Foreign Policy offers a way to solve the North Korea nuke problem, opining that the road to Pyongyang goes...
This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a symposium on the latest issues of the Leiden Journal of International Law, introduced here by Dov Jacobs. The first article, On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority by Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, discussed the functions of international courts in the international legal order beyond their traditional dispute settlement...
The US says with "moderate confidence" that North Korea does in fact have a nuclear weapon that they would be capable of mounting to a ballistic missile, but that such a weapon would likely be unreliable. At the G8 summit in London, leaders were "appalled" by the violence and number of casualties in Syria and urged humanitarian assistance from all countries. During...
Today (April 12) St. John's Law School of Law is hosting a conference in New York in cooperation with NATO's Allied Command Transformation group entitled Cyberconflict: Threats, Responses and the Rule of Law. The conference brings together experts from the armed forces, academia, and law enforcement to consider issues at the intersection of technology, law enforcement, national security, civil liberties...
Pierre N. Leval, a well-respected judge who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, has published a full-scale no-holds-barred policy defense of the Alien Tort Statute in Foreign Affairs. The essay, which is adapted from his lecture to the New York City Bar Association, offers the standard argument in favor of the...
Internal debate inside the Administration must be heating up, because someone in D.C. is in a leaky mood. McClatchy yesterday released a story on U.S. targeting operations billed as the “first independent evaluation of internal U.S. intelligence accounting” of such operations. The report is based substantially on classified reports covering most (not all) of the drone strikes carried out by the...
Human Rights Watch has published a new report entitled Death from the Skies alleging that Syrian forces have killed over 4,300 civilians by targeting places like bakeries and hospitals, and calls these air raids war crimes. Concerns about Syria and North Korea top the agenda of the G8 summit taking place this week in London. The EU has informed North Korea that...
The International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea has received a request for an advisory opinion from the Sub Regional Fisheries Commission located in Senegal. The Commission is a treaty based organization founded in 1985, which has seven member states (Senegal, Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone). Some background information on the Commission is available here. The...
