Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

[Philip Alston responds to Frédéric Mégret’s comments on Alston’s recently published article, Hobbling the Monitors: Should U.N. Human Rights Monitors be Accountable?. This post is part of the Second Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] I am grateful to Frédéric Mégret for his very thoughtful comments on my article. Fred’s own excellent work on the accountability of “International Prosecutors: Accountability and Ethics” (available at ) is one of the few sustained and probing analyses of the difficult topic of the accountability of those playing a crucial role in what might...

to organized political communities, including the international community as symbolized by the United Nations, law is a necessary but not sufficient condition for legitimacy. Perhaps the UN University could undertake a project devoted to the theoretical exploration of the relationship by a team of political scientists and international law scholars. Second, rather than the relationship between legitimacy and justice, that between power and justice or, even better, between realism and idealism, will prove more fruitful in the UN context. The organization needs to achieve a better balance between the wish...

It’s good to be back battling with my fellow co-bloggers. I still owe Chris and Deborah a response on other matters, but let me just briefly respond to Kevin’s smart but still not entirely convincing post. It’s not that I have any serious rebuttal of Kevin’s legal analysis of the Honduras Constitution (and I apologize for my boo-boo on the Law Library of Congress vs. the CRS). Rather, the point of my post on Koh was that the Honduran constitutional legal question is pretty central – indeed, it might be...

[Carsten Stahn is Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice at Leiden University and Programme Director of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law, Executive Editor of the Criminal Law Forum and project leader of the Jus Post Bellum Project.] Harold Koh’s thought-provoking post on Just Security on ‘Syria and the Law of Humanitarian Intervention – Part II’ illustrates the struggles of international law to cope with injustices and violations of legal norms, including the ban of the prohibition...

terms of Article 36 of 1977 Additional Protocol I. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE TO: Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016. This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For By Paul Shawcross The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons: The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than 850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it. The Administration...

...in response to Israel’s occupation policies. But the Dáil motion’s purposeful use of “de facto annexation” to describe Israeli activities is notable. This is not simply because the Dáil’s framing made Ireland the first state to declare that Israel has annexed territory otherwise understood as occupied. The conceptual shift that informed the Irish pronouncement finds its antecedents in the International Court of Justice’s Wall Opinion which described the construction of a separation barrier as amounting to a fait accompli that threatened permanence and would thus constitute de facto annexation. More...

armed conflict without taking into account the comparative justness of their causes. Consider the distributive-justice rationale for CDRs. Blum says that “[i]n transposing distributive justice arguments onto war, the question arises whether the general moral obligations that are owed by one society to another endure when the two societies are at war.” How can that question be answered without considering whether one party to the conflict is an aggressor and one is simply defending itself? As far as I can tell, there is no coherent normative rationale for assuming that...

The United Nations Team of Experts on the Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict and its partners launched in July 2020 a series of webinars, the Digital Dialogue Series . It is designed to allow academics, policymakers and practitioners to have open discussions, provoke critical reflections, and hopefully inspire a community of practice for the delivery of truly accessible and effective survivor-centered justice. On 17 November 2020, the fourth Digital Dialogue focused on the justice response to sexual violence committed in the Central African Republic (CAR) , and...

...imagine it to be but does not reflect what CIL is “as a real-world sociological phenomenon.”  Accurately understood, CIL is more unstable, fragmentary and disorderly than any rulebook would be.   In the everyday practice of international law, she tells us, CIL “looks nothing like the rulebook conception.” It does not derive from intelligible and generally applicable secondary rules but instead emerges more organically, through an unstructured and “heterarchical” process in which the participants apply variable criteria to justify their normative positions in CIL.  Its content is neither fixed nor...

...question for each reader of the article to judge. This being said, I would vigorously defend my emphasis on the failures of the Basel Committee. I would do so in light both of the disagreements of the 1990s and of the Committee’s resolute insistence, throughout the 2000s, in going forward with a capital adequacy model that is now widely regarded as theoretically flawed and overly responsive to the banks’ preferences. For more detail, I highly recommend Daniel Tarullo’s recent book on Basel II. Second, David raises the crucial question of...

...the Senate bill appears to contain no such language. On the contrary, it ties detention authority squarely to the 2001 AUMF, and describes the scope of that detention authority precisely as the courts (and Obama Administration) have done in the Guantanamo habeas cases in the federal courts. It also, for the first time, makes express Congress’ intention that detention under this authority be carried out pursuant to the law of war.” In response, Ben asks: “Is there a softening here of opposition to detention legislation? Or is the apparent complacency...

...(a point acknowledged in the above commentary but not in the article itself). Nor does IHL provide national authorities with any authority to capture and detain individuals engaged in non-international armed conflicts without the privilege of doing so. Rather, such responses will continue to be governed by other sources of national and international law, including the law of the sea and international human rights law. So, even applying IHL to this potential scenario results in a renvoi to a law enforcement model of capture, detention, and prosecution. Regardless of the...