The flap over cartoons continues to rock the Muslim world. The BBC has great coverage with a dozen articles addressing the topic. The issue is particularly sensitive and reflects deep cultural and religious differences between Western values of freedom of expression and Islamic values of the holiness of the Prophet Muhammad. Obviously Western media should be more sensitive to depictions...
Kofi Annan will step down as UN Secretary General this December. The campaign season for his replacement is heating up. By tradition of regional rotation, it's Asia's "turn" to supply the Secretary General (though the region is defined rather broadly to include the Middle East). Richard Holbrooke's op-ed in today's Washington Post reviews the potential candidates:· Surakiart Sathirathai, Thailand's deputy...
I couldn't resist this news item about today's events at the Security Council. Apparently, some Perm Reps believe in the German university "Akademische Viertel" (academic quarter) rule of promptness: so long as you arrive within fifteen minutes of a scheduled meeting, you are on time. US Ambassador John Bolton, perhaps taking the lead from his President who is known for...
I will speaking tomorrow at the Barnes Symposium held at the University of South Carolina Law School. The symposium as a whole will discuss the legitimacy of western views of human rights and will have participants from all over the world, both in person and via video conference (a list of speakers is found here). I myself will...
The U.S. Congress last night brought the U.S. in compliance with two WTO decisions. First, it essentially scrapped the U.S. program of subsidies for cotton farmers. The proximate cause of this decision was Brazil's victory last year in the WTO finding that such subsidies violated WTO obligations. The other proximate cause, of course, is the renewed emphasis in Congress...
My vote for the most important international law case in January is the Ninth Circuit's decision in United States v. Clark. The case represents a rare and important instance of a court attempting to grapple with the scope of the Foreign Commerce Clause.Michael Clark was convicted of traveling to Cambodia to engage in commercial sex with a minor in violation...
My friends at UN Watch have relaunched a completely revamped and upgraded website. It is a great resource for information about NGO activities at the UN human rights organs and UN democratic reform efforts more generally. UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer has even started a blog section. (Click here for his comments on MLK JR day.)If you want to...
If the FBI had a file on you, what would you do? Prominent international criminal law professor Cherif Bassiouni faced precisely such a dilemma. So what did Bassiouni do? Bassiouni, who teaches at Depaul School of Law and is well known in ICC circles, requested a copy of the files, found errors in the 50-page report, and demanded that they...
The key foreign relations component of President Bush's State of the Union speech last night was the global march of democracy. It is now beyond dispute that this issue is the key to his foreign relations agenda for the second term. As he put it, "Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will...
As Roger noted a couple of weeks ago, my colleague Nora Demleitner testified on behalf of newly-confirmed Justice Samuel Alito during his confirmation hearings. Nora, a criminal and immigration law expert and a former Alito clerk, has suggested that Alito will be quite progressive on certain immigration law-related issues. Here are some of her further thoughts on Alito's decision in...
If you earn income on a research expedition in Antarctica, can you claim a tax exemption for foreign earned income? The tax regulations allow an exclusion from gross income for any foreign earned income, but the latter term is defined as residency for a qualified period in a "foreign country."The United States Tax Court ruled this week in Arnett v....
Joel Stein has a piece in the L.A. Times this week entitled "Warriors and Wusses" that takes to task anyone who supports our troops in Iraq. Here is an excerpt: "I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're...
