4,191 research outputs found
Introduction
The articles in this symposium issue of the Michigan Journal of International Law represent the product of a historic and path-breaking conference held at the University of Michigan Law School in February 2007. The two-day meeting brought together an extraordinary array of scholars and practitioners to examine closely the relevance of international law for the gathering of intelligence by states. Although this long-neglected topic has gained increased relevance since the use of more controversial intelligence-gathering methods by the United States as part of its global war on terror, many of the legal issues are as old as the craft of intelligence itself
The Law of Occupation and UN Administration of Territory: Mandatory, Desirable, or Irrelevant?
Governments and international organizations as well as academic commentators have remarked upon the similarities and differences between occupation of territory by States and administration of territory by the United Nations. Although formal administration of territory by the United Nations has been limited to a small number of cases, the possibility of future revival of this practice warrants consideration of the relevance of the law of occupation (hereafter LO) to this phenomenon. This paper attempts to sketch out the major issues in an attempt to guide the experts in their discussion
Business
This chapter seeks to expose some of the divergences between doctrine and reality, and to suggest ways of understanding the field that take proper account of business. It does so first by examining the roles and goals of business entities with respect to international environmental law. It then examines how international law has accommodated the place of business in environmental policy with respect to two key issues: (1) corporations as the target of legal obligations; and (2) corporations as participants in the process of international environmental law, particularly with respect to law-making and implementation. I conclude with some thoughts regarding a reconceptualization of the doctrine
Distribution of Marital Assets in Community Property Jurisdictions: Equitable Doesn\u27t Equal Equal
Labeling Mass Atrocity: Does and Should International Criminal Law Rank Evil?
This essay concerns mass atrocity, not the kind that happened on September 11th, but an older kind when governments and those under them and supported by them killed innocent civilians on the basis of their ethnicity, on the basis of their politics, on the basis of their religion, or other traits of the group. These acts, crimes against humanity and genocide, were criminalized in the period after World War II by the International Military Tribunal and then by the Genocide Convention. These were very, very important steps forward in international criminal law, but the result of the post-war period was, in effect, two international criminal prescriptions, one through custom and one through treaty, and for two different crimes. The customary law crime was the crime against humanity, now codified more or less in the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. The treaty-based law crime was the crime of genocide as set forth in the Genocide Convention of 1948
Review of \u3cem\u3eHuman Rights: Between Idealism and Realism\u3c/em\u3e
For centuries, moral philosophers have regarded ethics and justice in the international plane as part of their domain. The move from the personal to the societal or national to the global seems effortless. In recent years, philosophers in ethics have devoted considerable attention to the ethical significance of nationality and patriotism, asking whether an impartial morality permits better treatment of an individual’s co-nationals; while those in politics have revisited issues of international justice through, for instance, works on human rights and just war theory. These two bodies of work both address what constitutes a just world and what role the individual should play in furthering it. They correspond in many ways to the interactional versus institutional conceptions of morality and justice identified by Thomas Pogge
Accountability and the Sri Lankan Civil War
Sri Lanka\u27s civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka\u27s armed forces on a small strip of land in the island\u27s northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka\u27s majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter\u27s rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian targets; and for many years the LTTE controlled large parts of northern and eastern Sri Lanka.
The war\u27s last phase was characterized by a large intensification of violence from September 2008 through May 2009, as the government deployed an impressive military force against LTTE-controlled areas by land, sea, and air. In the process, its armed forces attacked civilians and hospitals, and denied food and medicines to the population; the LTTE, for its part, refused to let civilians under its control cross to the safety of government-held areas. As a result, thousands of civilians in the north were killed and injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes and eventually interned in government camps. Nearly the whole LTTE leadership was killed in the process. International organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and foreign media had little access to the conflict zone. The government took credit internationally for its success in defeating a terrorist movement and won a huge majority in the next election.
In such a scenario, is it possible to devise strategies to hold accountable those from both sides who committed abuses against civilians? This Current Development reviews the efforts by international actors to address accountability for the civilian deaths and injuries during the final stages of the conflict. It examines the reactions of the United Nations to the war; the work of the secretary-general\u27s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka; and the follow-up to that report culminating in the passage of a resolution on Sri Lanka in the Human Rights Council in March 2012. My goal is to highlight the key issues of international law that have arisen and the approach taken by the UN system. The Sri Lanka case shows that, despite an impressive set of legal norms in place to deal with atrocities such as those committed in this conflict, the infusion of politics and the limitations of unprepared institutions can seriously delay prospects for accountability
Introduction to the Symposium on Soft and Hard Law on Business and Human Rights
This symposium turns to a major debate within a field of international law that has moved from the periphery to center stage in just a few decades—business and human rights, or BHR: Can and should international law\u27s approach to the human rights impacts of business activity shift from today\u27s mostly soft-law framework to a multilateral treaty regime? While advocates for and against such a treaty debate this point at the UN Human Rights Council and other venues, this symposium examines the problem from four theoretical perspectives. Each contribution offers insights for practitioners and scholars alike, but they suggest no easy answers
Think Again: The Geneva Conventions
The following essay is based on the author’s article of the same name in the “Think Again” section of the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Policy (pages 26-32). It is reproduced here with permission from FOREIGN POLICY, www.ForeignPolicy.com, #165 (March/April 2008). Copyright 2008 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The “Think Again” section of Foreign Policy seeks to educate readers by presenting and responding to common myths and conventional wisdom on important matters of international relations.
“The Geneva Conventions are obsolete”. Only in the minor details. The laws of armed conflict are old; they date back millennia to warrior codes used in ancient Greece. But the modern Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of soldiers and civilians in war, can trace their direct origin to 1859, when Swiss businessman Henri Dunant happened upon the bloody aftermath of the Battle of Solferino. His outrage at the suffering of the wounded led him to establish what would become the International Committee of the Red Cross, which later lobbied for rules improving the treatment of injured combatants. Decades later, when the devastation of World War II demonstrated that broader protections were necessary, the modern Geneva Conventions were created, producing a kind of international “bill of rights” that governs the handling of casualties, prisoners of war (POWs), and civilians in war zones. Today, the conventions have been ratified by every nation on the planet
Land Feuds and Their Solutions: Finding International Law Beyond the Tribunal Chamber
The resolution of conflicting claims to land has long stood at the heart of the project of international law. Indeed, the encounter between the order envisaged by advocates of the law of nations and what Georges Scelle called the obsession with territory has been a defining struggle for our field, demonstrating to some its promise and to others its futility. Much, perhaps even most, legal scholarship on this subject over the last century has focused on adjudication by ad hoc tribunals or standing courts, in which jurists have derived and invoked hallowed principles that enabled them to draw lines-across mountains, deserts, rivers, and human settlements-where mere politicians had never succeeded. The doctrines on territorial sovereignty emanating from these decisions suggested a bright future for law. Yet a more pessimistic appraisal would see a darker image, one characterized by war-interstate, colonial, and civil and territorial settlement whose lines have reflected power and politics, but surely not norms. Adjudications could be viewed as a sideshow for addressing small-scale conflicts, the results dictated more by a desire to appease both parties than by reasoning toward some principled solution
- …