The week on Opinio Juris started off on a lighter note with Ken's post on the Obama Administration's response to a petition to build the Death Star. And although the administration's answer encourages readers to "pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field", our comments raised the question of customary inter-stellar law. The pop cultural fun continued later with...
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has appeared in a court for the first time since his capture last year, in the western town of Zintan, where he is facing charges related to a visit by an ICC lawyer last year. Jurist has more here. US and ECOWAS troops will support France’s mission in Mali. Armed Groups in International Law has an insightful post on...
I am delighted to announce that Thomas Graham, the U.S. Member of the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body, will be giving the Shapiro Lecture at Hofstra entitled "It Sure Looks Different from the Inside: Deciding International Disputes at the WTO." Graham has been an observer and a participant in the international trade law system since the 1970s as a USTR attorney,...
A team from the IAEA is in Tehran for nuclear talks with the Iranian regime. The ICC has launched an investigation into the situation in Mali, as Western troops continue to assist Mali's government in its fight against the al-Qaeda linked rebels. The ICC press release can be found here and Jurist has more here. An al-Qaeda affiliate group is holding a group of at least 20 foreign...
I can’t imagine that the DOD-DOJ-DOS-DNI-CIA lawyers assigned to this one are getting much sleep these days. According to the Washington Post: The Obama administration is considering significant military backing for France’s drive against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali…. The loosely affiliated web of Malian militants in the country’s north includes members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). But other...
The African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are becoming active sanctioners in Africa. In the last few years, the AU and ECOWAS have applied sanctions in many African conflicts, including Mali, the Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, and Guinea-Bissau. This represents a lot of activity for the AU in particular, which is only 10...
Ordinarily I would leave events posting to our regular postings, but I fell behind and wanted to flag the upcoming Friday deadline for paper proposals for the "Law and Robotics Conference." It will take place on April 8-9, 2013, at Stanford Law School (the conference follows on the highly successful law and robotics conference that took place at University of Miami...
Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that the United States would give Afghanistan its own fleet of aerial surveillance drones and would speed up the handover of detainees held by American forces. The European Court of Human Rights has found in Eweida and Others v. The United Kingdom (ECHR court document) that British Airways discriminated against a devoutly Christian employee by making her...
My friend and colleague David Caron, C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has been named the new Dean at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London. The press release is here. I have known David Caron for over twenty years and always thought he would make an excellent Dean or...
A top US diplomacy team has been sent to Japan and South-Korea to douse the simmering tensions between the two nations. Facing strong electoral competition from EU skeptic parties, the Icelandic government has suspended negotiations on EU accession until after the elections in April. Navi Pillay has called for an international inquiry into widespread human rights abuses in North Korea during the past decades. Cuba has relaxed restrictions on Cuban's freedom to...
My thanks to Jennifer for contributing her post, which makes the case for referring the situation in Syria to the ICC. I don't necessarily disagree with her bottom line, but I have my hesitations. And I want to offer a few thoughts about the idea of a referral in general. First, as Jennifer notes, the letter states that a Security Council...
French fighter jets pounded Islamist rebel strongholds deep in northern Mali on Sunday as Paris poured more troops into the capital Bamako, awaiting a West African force to dislodge al Qaeda-linked insurgents from the country's north. Britain has given logistical support to the French operation to stop al-Qaeda affiliates in Mali. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has said that its military operation...
