The Security Council held an unusual meeting yesterday morning entitled "Strengthening international law: rule of law and maintenance of international peace and security". The reason it is unusual, at least to me, is that the discussion was not about any particular issue or problem, but rather a free-wheeling abstract discussion about the importance of international law generally. ...
The NYT and WSJ report that the Bush Administration, specifically the CIA and Treasury Department, have been secretly monitoring financial transactions conducted through SWIFT, a Belgian firm that conducts most of the world's financial traffic. This is a pretty obscure area of law, but it strikes me that the President is in better legal shape here than in the NSA wiretapping...
Ok this is really scary. According to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center "majorities in Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan say that they do not believe groups of Arabs carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks." This is in addition to significant minorities of Muslims polled in France, Germany, Spain, Pakistan, and Nigeria who shared the...
Kim Sokchea of the International University of Japan has just posted on SSRN an interesting empirical study confirming what has long been expected: that bilateral investment treaties (BITs) "play a significant role in stimulating the inflows of foreign investment." You can download the article here. Here is the abstract: Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are commonly regarded as one of the policy...
The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a report on Challenges for a Postelection Mexico. It takes a very cautious approach to any proposal for significant change on immigration and encourages a more aggressive approach to trade promotion for Mexican products. The focus of the report includes direct assistance to Mexico as a mechanism to stem the...
The chairman of an upcoming U.N. Conference on Small Arms Review tells Reuters he has received over 100,000 letters from U.S. gun-owners protesting the U.N.'s plot to ban all guns worldwide. According to the conference chairman, however, these letters are misguided. The small arms conference," he says, "will not negotiate any treaty to prohibit citizens of any country from...
Opinio Juris has been receiving a significant number of hits in recent days from Google searches for “North American Union.” The hits relate to a post by Julian Ku regarding last year's report by the Council on Foreign Relations on a proposed North American Community. All this traffic made me quite curious as to what was generated...
As a dedicated fan of NFL football, I always thought rugby was a silly game. For the record: I was wrong. The denizens of my newly-adopted country are rugby mad, and having watched two tests between New Zealand's All Blacks -- the world's best rugby team -- and Ireland, I now understand why. It's an amazing game,...
Last week we did a poll asking whether Ahmadinejad should be allowed to attend the World Cup. The poll seemed to express a strong preference to keep politics out of the World Cup, with 55% voting that Ahmadinejad should be allowed to attend Iranian matches in Germany. Now that Iran is out of the picture, the question of whether Ahmadinejad...
Yesterday, the United Nations Human Rights Council opened its inaugural session in Geneva. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the new 47-member body to break with its much maligned predecessor, the U.N. Human Rights Commission: [T]he Council's work must mark a clean break from the past. That must be apparent in the way you develop and apply the universal periodic...
The ICC's Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression has released an annotated agenda of its intersessional meeting last week at Princeton. The meeting addressed four interrelated issues: [1] The relationship between the crime of aggression and Article 25(3) of the Rome Statute, which establishes the possible forms of participation in a crime. Two different approaches have...
The Cambodian government has announced that the judges of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal will be sworn in on July 3, with prosecutors to begin "the formal launching of judicial work" on July 10. Trials are expected to begin in 2007. Cambodia and the UN agreed in 2003 to set up a hybrid tribunal to prosecute surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for...
