In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

29 Jun

In an important decision on treaty interpretation and the political question doctrine, the D.C. Circuit yesterday affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by a number of Korean, Taiwanese, and Filipino women who alleged rape, torture, and other abuse at the hands of Japanese soldiers during World War II. The lawsuit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute and had...

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29 Jun

A U.N. Commission of Experts has recommended that the Security Council push Indonesia to re-open trials of individuals suspected of committing war crimes in the Timor-Leste (East Timor). Indonesia has conducted prosecutions via an ad hoc tribunal, but according to the commission, these prosecutions were little more than sham trials.I haven't seen the report which is not available online,...

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28 Jun

This very interesting piece from the St. Louis Post Dispatch notes that the U.S. is obligated to announce its measures for implementation of a March WTO decision requiring cotton subsidy cuts by Friday (July 1) and that many cotton farmers are understandably nervous about the expected cuts.This may make the WTO seem fairly powerful, but in reality, the U.S. could...

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27 Jun

The reference library at the UN has sent out an announcement stating:Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the UN Headquarters in New York is announcing the creation of a new blog called “UN Pulse: Connecting to UN Information.”The blog focuses on just-released UN system-wide online information, major reports, publications and documents and we have included a category called “International Law.” Created and...

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27 Jun

David Bosco, the Senior Editor of Foreign Policy Magazine and an international lawyer, has a thoughtful piece on John Bolton in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. I think it is worth reading by Bolton apologists and critics alike because it gets away from the heated rhetoric from both sides and uses the Bolton nomination to ask some tough questions...

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24 Jun

This report from Agence France Press suggests that the U.S. has broken new ground in admitting to torture when it filed its report to the Committee Against Torture, a report that is required by the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). Here is the triumphant reaction by UN officials:'They are no longer trying...

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24 Jun

Wow! According to this survey, China is more popular among the public in 16 Western European countries than the U.S. This proves that anti-Americanism is remarkably widespread and deep in Europe. And it also suggests that the public, even in liberal democratic Western Europe, don't care very much about human rights violations, as long as they occur in other countries...

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23 Jun

While Japan has been scheming to overturn IWC limitations on its whaling activities, it has also been finding new ways to annoy its neighbors. The most hilarious of these is Japan's attempt to establish Okinotori, an uninhabited series of rocks/islands in the Pacific. Japan has done this by assigning Okinotori a Tokyo address thereby making it part of the municipality...

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21 Jun

Opinio Juris is pleased to publish the first in an ongoing series of blog interviews with preeminent practioners, scholars and jurists in international law. We are honored that our first interview is with Justice Richard Goldstone. Justice Goldstone's stepped down last year as a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, on which served from its establishment in 1994...

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20 Jun

Maybe April is the cruellest month, but May and June haven’t been so great for the European Union, either. First there was the collapse of the EU Constitutional process at the hands of the French and the Dutch. And now there is a budgetary debacle that redoubles the perception that the “European project” is in crisis.In short, negotiations over the...

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