Yesterday, Myanmar held peace talks between ethnic groups in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in an attempt to resolve the ongoing Kachin conflict. British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested to diverting hundreds of millions of pounds sterling from foreign aid into security and defense. A French General appointed to head the EU's mission to Mali urged the EU to equip the "very impoverished" Malian forces,...
An Israeli soldier has caused outrage because of a photo posted to Instagram showing what appears to be a Palestinian child in the crosshairs of his rifle. Chinese government officials considered using a drone to target a suspected drug lord hiding in Myanmar. In other drone news, the United Arab Emirates has signed a contract with the US to purchase approximately $200 million worth of American-made...
Breaking news: China has rejected arbitration under Annex VII of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea with the Philippines, dealing a heavy blow to the future of dispute settlement under UNCLOS (h/t China Law Prof Blog). According to this China Daily report, "Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Ma Keqing had an appointment with officials from the Philippines' Foreign...
Over at the International Economic Law and Policy Blog, Rob Howse brings daily updates of the Seal hearings at the WTO. The New Zealand government has decided to go ahead with plans to introduce plain packaging for tobacco products, but the enactment of the actual legislation could be postponed depending on the outcome of the WTO and arbitration cases pending against similar Australian...
The International Peace Institute (where, in full disclosure, I am spending part of my sabbatical as a Senior Visiting Advisor) has just released a new report entitled Peace, Justice and Reconciliation in Africa. The report, which will be of interest to those who follow the ICC and transitional justice issues, is available here. The report makes two recommendations: 1) The African Union's...
There is an interesting discussion by Stephen Walt over at Foreign Policy on why academic writing is so bad. It is a subject academics are reluctant to discuss, yet there is no doubt that much of what passes as legal scholarship is dull, disagreeable, undigestable. Here's Walt's take: The first problem is that many academics (and especially younger...
Bangladesh has amended its war crimes statute to allow the retrial of cases from 1971 amid protests. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the amendments will threaten the legitimacy of the tribunal. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is proposing changes to its rules of procedure in order to strengthen the Inter-American system of human rights. ASIL has posted a new Insight on the International Law Issues in the Department...
[Michael W. Lewis is a Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University where he teaches International Law and the Law of War.] In his Hamdan opinion in 2006 Justice Stevens described the conflict between al Qaeda and the United States as a NIAC (his opinion did not address in any way the geographical scope of that NIAC). He then went on to measure the...
I used to blog regularly about the Whale Wars, my name for the ongoing struggle between Japanese Whalers and those groups devoted to protecting whales. But I stopped almost three years ago when Australia filed its case against Japan in the ICJ, since nothing important seems to have happened since then. (Did we really need 22 months for written proceedings, when...
This week on Opinio Juris, Julian noticed the apparent truce between the American right and the ICC, but didn't go as far as calling it peace. Further on the ICC, Kevin pointed out a flagrant mistake at the Washington Times, and argued that the OTP was wrong in concluding that Libya is able to try Saif Gaddafi, because the Rome Statute does not consider a...
“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all in one, is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country,” Senator Angus King Jr. of Maine said at the Brennan hearing. “If you’re planning a strike over a matter of days, weeks or months, there is an opportunity to at least go to some outside-of-the-executive-branch body, like the FISA Court, in a confidential and top-secret way, make the case that this American citizen is an enemy combatant.” Mr. Brennan said the idea was worthy of discussion, adding that the Obama administration had “wrestled with this.” Two other senators, Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, also expressed interest. Even Robert Gates, a former C.I.A. director who was defense secretary under President George W. Bush and President Obama, said on CNN that such a judicial panel “would give the American people confidence” that a proper case had been made against an American citizen.The speed with which this idea has gained currency in Washington has, I fear, less to do with its merits and more to do with the intense attractiveness of the notion that there might be a neat procedural solution to a messy substantive problem. Alas, I don’t think it works that way. Here’s my thinking.
Legal philosopher and renowned scholar Ronald Dworkin passed away yesterday in London at the age of 81. Kenyan presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta asked the ICC to postpone his trial. A city court in Oslo, Norway convicted a Rwandan man for involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and sentenced him to 21 years in prison. Amid peace talks, seven troops and an unidentified number...
