This article in the New York Times by Thom Shanker raises a critically important question for the current conflict in the Middle East. Shanker writes, Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning,...
According to this report by Xinhua (China's news agency), the ICC has agreed not to interfere with peace talks between Uganda and its rebel opposition the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Peace talks had previously broken down because of the ICC's arrest warrants against the LRA leaders. We'll see exactly what this means, because the ICC itself has not released...
This interesting Washington Post article on U.S. bioweapons research goes a bit too far trying to drum up a legal controversy. According to the Post, the Department of Homeland Security has a super-secret bioweapons research facility which some fear may violate the 1972 Convention Against Biological and Toxin Weapons. According to the Post article, the U.S. believes it is in...
The separatist conflict in Moldova about which I have been blogging received a brief mention by President Bush on Thursday. Reuters reports the following regarding the meeting of President Bush and Romanian President Basescu:The leaders also agreed that separatists in neighboring Moldova should not be allowed to secede from the country. "We support the territorial integrity of Moldova," Bush said.Actually...
The Human Rights Committee has released an advance copy of its report on US compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. From a quick skim, it looks highly critical. (Just like the PR-insensitive UN to issue something newsworthy like this on a late summer Friday.) A predictable number of observations address GWOT detainee issues,...
I unwisely waded into a debate between Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review and Emily Bazelon of Slate over alleged mistakes and misrepresentations in Justice Stevens’ opinion for the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. As I pointed out earlier this week, Ponnuru charged that Justice Stevens mistakenly used legislative history in the Hamdan decision and that this was a...
I imagine John Gerard Ruggie knew he was throwing a bomb when he released his interim report on the Norms earlier this year. But perhaps that’s exactly what Kofi Annan had in mind in naming him as his Special Representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations. Approved by the UN Human Rights Commission in 2003,...
According to this website: "In 2002, 53 million people in the world lived in households in receipt of US$200 purchasing power parity (PPP) per day. Of these high earners, 58% lived in the United States. Western Europe and South America are also home to quite large populations of high earners. Within Western Europe the most very high earners live in...
The increasing intersection of IP [intellectual property] and human rights appears inevitable, and it will alter the shape and the trajectory of new legal rules in both camps. To understand the future of both IP and human rights law we must think systematically about how the rising density of the international system affects the process of rulemaking. At...
Not too many responses to my tepid call a few weeks back to beef up the international law offerings on this collective effort. There is now an entry for Abram Chayes (by Mark K. Jensen - it is possible to record one's authorship, on an entry's history page). I took it on myself to expand, however inadequately, the...
Eugene Volokh has a post over at the Conspiracy on the eligibility of foreign citizens to serve as judicial law clerks. As he notes, many are, so long as they hail from a country with which the U.S. has a defense treaty. I know of at least one instance of a non-citizen (from an EU state) clerking at...
In the case of Andersen v. King County, the Washington State Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the state's Defense of Marriage Act was not unconstitutional. The court’s majority opinion and the concurring and dissenting opinions are available here. I just wanted to offer a quick comment about comparativism. It is noteworthy that the court embraces living constitutionalism,...
