For the first episode in the Multi-blog series on the Updated Geneva Conventions Commentaries, the Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog has published Locating the Geneva Conventions Commentaries in the International Legal Landscape, by Jean-Marie Henckaerts.

View of destruction in downtown Homs, Syria. © Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos for ICRC

Jean-Marie is the head of the unit in charge of the update of the ICRC Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977.

To kick off the series, Jean-Marie addresses critical questions surrounding the commentaries such as: Where do the ICRC Commentaries fit into the legal landscape? What are the rules governing treaty interpretation and how do they operate in the area of IHL? Where does the ICRC’s legitimacy to interpret the Geneva Conventions stem from?

Read the full post on the ICRC’s Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog.

This series is brought to you by ICRC’s Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog, Intercross and Opinio Juris.

[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor, at The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS, and Chair of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Criminal Court Committee. The views expressed are those of the author.]

A significant event happened quietly at the UN on June 27: Palestine deposited the thirtieth instrument of ratification of the International Criminal Court’s crime of aggression amendment, with 30 ratifications being the required number for activation. However, one more vote to activate the amendment, to occur after January 1, 2017, is required by the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties for the ICC to be able to exercise jurisdiction. Thus, Palestine’s deposit did not cause the amendment to become operational, although it brought it a step closer to the activation vote planned for December 2017.

There may be some confusion on the meaning of Palestinian ratification among those not steeped in the jurisdictional nuances of the crime of aggression amendment negotiated in 2010 in Kampala, Uganda. Although one might think that this is all about the Palestinians trying to create jurisdiction over Israel vis-à-vis the crime of aggression, that is not how it will work.

The crime of aggression amendment has a different jurisdictional regime than what currently exists under the ICC’s Rome Statute concerning the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. If a national of a non-State Party (e.g., Israel) commits any of those crimes in the territory of a State Party, there would be ICC jurisdiction.

The crime of aggression amendment — whether for good or ill (depending on one’s perspective) —per 15bis(5) keeps crimes committed on the territory of, or by the nationals of, non-States Parties entirely out of its jurisdiction for purposes of State Party and proprio motu referrals (article 15bis). This means that Israeli nationals or crimes committed on Israeli territory will be outside the ICC’s crime of aggression jurisdiction. This then has a bizarre consequence here – that Palestine can ratify the crime of aggression amendment, not “opt out” of jurisdiction (something a State Party can also do per 15bis(4)), and, even after the crime activates, the ICC still could not prosecute Palestinian nationals who commit aggression against Israel, since Israel is a non-State Party. A Handbook compiled by some of the Kampala drafters clearly states: “Non-States Parties are thus excluded both as potential aggressor and victim States.” The crime of aggression amendment thus has significant jurisdictional loop-holes, and will create quite a narrow jurisdictional regime, even once activated. Stated more positively, it creates a consensual regime.

While activation also will activate ICC jurisdiction if the U.N. Security Council makes referrals (under article 15ter), it is considered unlikely that the US would permit alleged Israeli aggression to be referred.

So, the 30^th ratification brings the world one step closer to having crime of aggression jurisdiction activated before the ICC, but it does not have direct ramifications for Israel – whether that was the Palestinian goal or not.

At this point, the reader may well wonder – is this Kampala amendment worthwhile with all these jurisdictional loopholes? I will argue it is: activation of the crime will undoubtedly cause states to take pause and ponder more seriously the potential consequences of starting an illegal war, and this is a good thing – even if ICC jurisdiction will not cover the specific case in question; also, states may implement the amendment into their domestic laws, and that may create jurisdiction – giving further pause to states inclined to commence an illegal war. The goal of course is not to generate ICC cases, but to influence state behavior positively.

The crime of aggression, of course, is hardly a novel concept. It criminalizes what is already illegal under article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, and is similar in concept to the prosecutions of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which prosecuted war of aggression. In fact, states were working already over 100 years ago on this concept, when in 1913 they founded the “Peace Palace” in The Hague, Netherlands — in an attempt to have states litigate and arbitrate over issues of war, rather than go to war.

A few states have concerns about activation — the US for example, although it too as a non-State Party is exempt from jurisdiction vis-à-vis its nationals and crimes on its territory. Yet, the process is proceeding, with the 30 ratifications accomplished, and several other States Parties in the process of ratifying the amendment. US concern that humanitarian intervention would be criminalized may be something of a “red herring” – first, the US does not appear to have any clear and consistent policy of humanitarian intervention (for instance, as the UK has) and second, because, as at least most scholars seem to agree, humanitarian intervention would not be covered by the crime, as it would not constitute a “manifest” Charter violation. (The crime has a significant “threshold” in requiring that there be a “manifest” Charter violation [.pdf]; this means that only very serious cases that are unambiguously illegal , could be prosecuted.) The crime of aggression, in these ways, is rather conservative — having both jurisdictional loopholes and this high threshold.

There is still a chance, that, at some point, the ICC judges will find that Palestine is not a “state,” and thus was incapable of ratifying the Rome Statute, and similarly incapable of ratifying the crime of aggression amendment. (Judges always have jurisdiction to review their own jurisdiction – so regardless of the UN’s acceptance of the instruments of ratification, the ICC Judges could view the issue differently.) This would have little impact on the process of activating the crime, since several ratifications are in the pipeline, and will undoubtedly happen prior to December 2016. (There must be a year’s delay after the 30th ratification, for activation, along with the ASP vote).

Overall, while the Palestinians may have hoped to make a strong political statement, what the ICC crime of aggression tries to do is take the issue of aggression more out of the political process and into judicial hands. How one feels about this may depend on one’s confidence in the ICC, which, despite some setbacks, has gradually been proving itself to be a responsible, judicial institution, warranting confidence and support.

Today through Wednesday, June 27-29, 2016, the Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law will host its fifth edition, at the New York University School of Law. The Forum is convened by Dino Kritsiotis (Univ. of Nottingham), Anne Orford (Univ. of Melbourne), and JHH Weiler (EUI/NYU), who will be joined this year by Benedict Kingsbury (NYU) and José Alvarez (NYU) as guest convenors. The program is here.

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Africa

• The United States and France supported Hissène Habré, the former Chadian dictator who was convicted of atrocity crimes on May 30, 2016, throughout his rule, Human Rights Watch said in two reports released today.
• The Eighth Africa Carbon Forum will focus on ensuring that countries put in place polices that are conscious of environmental sustainability and climate change resilience.
• Hundreds of gun-toting Al Shabaab fighters in pick-ups have taken back a town in Goof-Gadud area, located some 30Km north of Baidoa in Somolia on Sunday after SNA and AMISOM troops withdrew the town.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said “serious violations” have been committed in the current ceasefire in Yemen, and called on warring forces to reach a peace deal before the conflict claims more casualties.
• Weapons shipped into Jordan for Syrian rebels by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia were stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, the New York Times reported, citing American and Jordanian officials.

Asia

• China’s top diplomat arrived in Vietnam on Monday for a scheduled meeting to strengthen historically close relations, at a time when ties are strained by squabbles over the South China Sea.
• A U.S. prosecutor said on Monday that Chinese officials were involved in developing a United Nations-focused news outlet that was used to funnel bribes from a Macau billionaire to a former U.N. General Assembly president who died last week.
• At least six prisoners of the Taliban as well as a Taliban commander died following a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan at the weekend, according to conflicting reports which U.S. officials said they were investigating.

Europe

• The majority of British voters chose to leave the European Union last week, a vote that unnerved world leaders and markets. Chris posted here and Larry Helfer here with some first thoughts on the Brexit.
• Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has vowed to protect Scotland against the “devastating” fallout of Brexit and hinted that her government may use legal means to try to block Britain’s departure from the European Union. British Prime Minister David Cameron will be in Brussels today to brief EU Ministers of the decision.
• Italian coastguard and navy ships rescued over 3,300 migrants in 26 separate operations in the Mediterranean over the weekend, a spokesperson for the Italian navy told Reuters on Sunday.

Americas

• The Colombian government and FARC guerrillas have declared the final day of one of the world’s oldest wars with the signing of a ceasefire agreement to end more than 50 years of bloodshed.
• The United States has decided to place Myanmar on its global list of worst offenders in human trafficking, officials said, a move aimed at prodding the country’s new democratically elected government and its still-powerful military to do more to curb the use of child soldiers and forced labor.

Oceania

• During the 32nd session of the Council Plenary, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, Maina Kiai, zeroed in on Papua.

UN/World

• In a report released on Tuesday, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) also said by 2030, as many as 69 million children could die from “preventable causes” before the age of five if political leaders fail to address global inequality.

[Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University and a permanent visiting professor at iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen.]

As the world reacts to the shock of the Brexit referendum, international lawyers are turning their attention to the mechanics of Britain’s departure from the EU.  Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – the clause governing withdrawal – is now front page news.  A state’s decision to leave any international organization raises thorny questions of law and politics.  As I explain below, Article 50 answers some of these questions for withdrawals from the EU, but leaves many others unresolved.

The basics of Article 50

EU law was originally silent as to whether a state could leave the Union, generating debate over whether there was an implied right to exit.  Article 50(1) settles this issue, providing that “any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.”

Under Article 50, the decision to quit the EU is not self-executing, nor does it have immediate effect.  Rather, the exiting country must first “notify the European Council of its intention” to leave, which triggers a process for negotiations over withdrawal.  The hope, set out in Article 50(2), is that the remaining EU members and the departing nation will “conclude an agreement … setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union.”  That agreement must be approved by a “qualified majority” of the Council (20 of the 27 remaining EU members), by the European Parliament, and by the UK itself.

Article 50’s third paragraph specifies that the Lisbon Treaty (and, by implication, all other EU laws) “shall cease to apply” to the exiting state on the date the withdrawal agreement enters into force.  If no agreement is reached, EU membership ends “two years after the notification” of withdrawal – unless the Council and the UK unanimously agree to an extension.  Once the UK has officially departed, it can rejoin only by following the Lisbon Treaty procedures applicable to states seeking admission to the EU for the first time.

The least worst outcome – bargaining for an orderly withdrawal

By setting the ground rules for Britain’s withdrawal, Article 50 is already shaping talks between London and Brussels over the terms of the UK’s exit.  The effects can be roughly divided into three time periods:  the pre-notification period, the negotiations phase (what one reporter waggishly calls the UK’s departure lounge), and the post-exit relationship between the Britain and the EU.

Brexit supporters did not wake up to an EU-free Britain on the morning after the referendum.  The UK is still a fully-fledged member of the Union – and it will remain so if the British government does not formally notify the European Council of its intent to withdraw.  Article 50 says nothing about how, when or by whom such notification is to be made.  Presumably, notice would be given by the Prime Minster.  Before the vote, David Cameron stated that he would inform the European Council “straight away” after a “leave” vote.  But on Thursday he announced that notification would be given by his successor, who will take office by October 2016.

Why the change?  Having campaigned against Brexit and lost, it is not surprising that Cameron wants someone else to pull the trigger on the UK’s withdrawal and squelch any campaign to block withdrawal – a possibility raised by Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.  But even fervent British sovereigntists would be advised to support some delay in notifying the Council.  So long as the UK has not fired the starting gun on the two-year exit clock, it has the upper hand in negotiations with the other 27 EU nations.  Britain keeps both the benefits and the burdens of EU membership while the terms of its departure are hammered out.  It can’t be forced to leave the Union (or can it? – see below) unless those terms are to its liking.

Once notice is given, however, the advantage shifts to the continent.  If Britain and its former EU partners do not reach a deal within 24 months – or unanimously agree to extend negotiations – the UK is out.  A divorce that is finalized while the spouses are still squabbling over custody of the children and the division of marital property is messy and painful.  The equivalent for a non-negotiated Brexit – the sudden re-imposition of barriers to free movement of capital, goods and labor – is an outcome that even diehard British nationalists should want to avoid.

How long can the UK defer notification?  Article 50 doesn’t say, but politics rather than law will almost certainly provide the answer.  Both pro-Brexit voters and EU leaders are unlikely to oppose a modest delay.  But the uncertain economic and political fallout of a protracted British withdrawal will push both sides to the bargaining table regardless of when the UK gives notice – unless the British public catches a bad case of “Regrexit.”

Contrary to what some have claimed, however, the exit negotiations need not conclusively resolve London’s status vis-à-vis Brussels.  Article 50(2) requires a withdrawal agreement that “tak[es] account of the framework for [the UK’s] future relationship with the Union.”  An deal that takes plausible steps toward defining that relationship should suffice, even if it is a modus vivendi whose principal aim is an orderly disengagement.  The details of the Britain’s post-withdrawal status can be finalized at a later date – although in the interim EU law will cease to apply to the UK.

Avoiding a rush to the Brexit

As described above, Article 50’s withdrawal rules, although incomplete, do a reasonably good job of channeling the parties toward a political settlement of the UK’s departure over the next several years.  But some in the pro-Brexit camp are calling for more precipitous action, including introducing an EU Law (Emergency Provisions) Bill in the current session of the British Parliament to revise the European Communities Act 1972.  The Bill aims to “immediately end the rogue European Court of Justice’s control over national security, allow the Government to remove EU citizens whose presence is not conducive to the public good (including terrorists and serious criminals), [and] end the growing use of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights to overrule UK law ….”

There is no doubt that Parliament has the power to adopt such a Bill.  But from an international perspective, the enactment would rightly be seen as a grave violation of EU law, which continues to bind the UK until an exit deal is finalized or, failing that, two years after a notification of withdrawal.  The Bill would surely trigger a raft of lawsuits, by the EU Commission and by private litigants, challenging its legality and seeking fines and damages.  How would British judges respond to such suits?  The Bill would force UK courts to choose between their duty to apply EU law over conflicting national law and their obligation to defer to Parliament.  The result, as Cambridge professor Kenneth Armstrong has warned, would be a constitutional conflict of the first order.

The Bill might also provoke the remaining EU members to try to force Britain out.  The EU has no expulsion clause; one was considered but ultimately left out of the Lisbon Treaty.  But as my coauthors and I explain in a recent working paper, it is unsettled whether international law recognizes an implied right to expel.  And European leaders could attempt to achieve the same result indirectly, treating the Bill as a material breach that authorizes a suspension or termination of the Lisbon Treaty vis-à-vis the UK.  In either case, the legality of any expulsion effort would almost certainly be challenged in court.

In all events, the far better course for all concerned is to avoid a precipitous unilateral break and instead to negotiate Britain’s orderly departure from the EU.

As the news of the Brexit vote sinks in, commentators are considering the various longer-term effects. I want to highlight the how this may look to the EU’s neighbors to the east, especially countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia that have recently signed Association Agreements with the EU. Ukraine and Moldova, in particular, have electorates that are divided over whether to integrate more closely with the EU or with Russia’s nascent Eurasian Economic Union.  The debate over EU integration sparked Ukraine’s Maidan demonstrations and the subsequent separatist conflict.  All of these countries faced significant pressure from Russia to reject association with the EU. These countries became effectively a borderland between two systems, those of the EU and of Russia. And Russia, in particular, has treated this as a zero-sum struggle over the futures of these countries that had once been part of the USSR. So what happens in the EU is of critical concern to its neighbors to the east.

And what are the EU’s neighbors seeing today? There are already calls by some for exit referenda in other EU countries such the Netherlands and France. The 2017 French Presidential election is increasingly looking like it will be an important barometer for the future of the Union. News feeds are abuzz with concerns about whether Brexit is the start of a domino chain that will tear the EU asunder.

However, some commentators have suggested that, although there will be a formal exit of the UK, there will actually be ongoing deep coordination and low trade barriers between Britain and the EU. A technical exit but not an existential crisis. It is too early to predict with confidence which of many scenarios will come to pass.

But the fact that the EU’s stability is more uncertain today than it was yesterday will affect regional politics. In the U.S., you might have people looking nervously at the Dow but that is nothing compared to the concerns in Kiev, which is embroiled in a secessionist conflict in part because it chose to bet on the EU being an important part of the future of Ukraine.

For their part, politicians from the EU’s eastern neighbors countries are reacting to Brexit with–how shall I say it?—a stiff upper lip. Interfax-Ukraine reports:

First Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Iryna Gerashchenko and Deputy Prime Minister for Reintegration of Moldova Gheorghe Balan have discussed the result of the referendum on Britain’s exit from the European Union (Brexit) and its consequences for both countries.

“Ukraine and Moldova are disappointed with the results of the referendum and are concerned about the growing number of eurosceptics in the EU. However, Ukraine and Moldova are committed to the path of European integration and reforms,” Gerashchenko wrote on his Facebook page on Friday afternoon following the meeting.

Brave face notwithstanding, Ukraine and other countries along the EU’s eastern border that decided to sign Association Agreements with the EU will likely need to be reassured that they chose wisely. Some Members of Ukraine’s Parliament are concerned that Brexit will mean the EU will become inward-focused and delay the implementation of aspects of the Association Agreement that came so dear.

The EU will need to think clearly and act decisively not only about how it will manage the divorce with the UK but also about its strategy regarding its eastern neighbors—including both the states of the former USSR and Turkey as well.

For a deep-dive into the EU’s recent policies towards its neighbors (written before Brexit), see this paper from the EU’s Institute for Security Studies.

Last week, Adrian Hilton — a self-described “conservative academic, theologian, author and educationalist” — published a vicious hit-piece in The Spectator about SOAS. It’s entitled “A School of Anti-Semitism?”, and the name basically says it all. According to Hilton: “[p]retty much all student societies at SOAS have no choice but to conform to the Islamo-Marxist orthodoxy”; “the entire student body defines itself in terms of concentric circles of ethno–religious rhetoric, each competing for dominance”; “You can be thrown out of a meeting for being insufficiently black”; SOAS “allows students to organise themselves into warring ethno-religious factions and then sides with some and not others” — and on and on, ad nauseam.

The article is a dishonest caricature of my university, so SOAS asked The Spectator to publish a response. The magazine agreed to give me 600 words, which I greatly appreciate — but they also made me rewrite the final paragraph, claiming that my first one was unfair to Hilton. (Apparently being unfair to an entire university is fine, but being unfair to Hilton is not.) You can find my response here. And in case you are wondering, here is the final paragraph The Spectator refused to run:

Only Hilton knows why he felt the need to portray SOAS so unfairly. But his flagrant disregard for the truth seems to indicate that he is more afraid of SOAS’s multiculturalism than he is of its supposed anti-Semitism. For those who long for a whiter, more Judaeo-Christian world, the vibrancy of SOAS can be a scary sight indeed.

I hope you’ll read both the original article and my response. Comments most welcome!

There’s an interesting, if I suspect academic, discussion over at Just Security at the moment about whether the recent proposal by 51 State Department diplomats to use military force against the Assad regime directly would be lawful under domestic and/or international law. My suspicion that the discussion is at least at present academic is based on the unlikelihood that any such policy change is in the offing – particularly in this election year and, more important, in the context of the current President’s longstanding position that greater U.S. military force of this nature in Syria would be counterproductive. But academic at the moment or no, the questions are important and will certainly be faced early in the term of the administration that takes office in January 2017. And particularly on the international law side, the questions go to the heart of the larger issue of how much formal analysis one thinks international law in this area can bear. Marty Lederman and Ashely Deeks started the discussion here, Harold Koh responded here, and Charlie Savage has a good review of the way these debates unfolded in the administration considering the legality of the use of force in Libya and Syria here. So Continue Reading…

[This post is brought to you by ICRC’s Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog, Intercross and Opinio Juris.]

The updated Commentaries are an interpretive compass emerging from more than 60 years of application and interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. Over the rest of 2016, several academic blogs are hosting a joint series that brings to light the significance of the updated Commentary on the First Geneva Convention.

In March, the ICRC released an updated Commentary on the First Geneva Convention of 1949 (GCI). This is the first instalment of six new Commentaries aimed at bringing the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols of 1977, to the 21^st century.

This blog series is co-hosted by Intercross, the blog of the ICRC in Washington D.C., the ICRC’s new Humanitarian Law & Policy blog and us here at Opinio Juris.

This multi-blog venture is divided into three episodes, each of which focusing on a GCI provision – or a theme within a set of provisions – whose application and/or interpretation have evolved and give rise to debate among States and commentators. For each phase, the three blogs will invite one author to either initiate the conversation or act as respondent. The three episodes are respectively scheduled for this summer, fall and winter 2016.

The blogs will be regularly updated with past and upcoming posts, along with an evolving publication calendar. To kick off the series, Humanitarian Law & Policy will invite Jean-Marie Henckaerts, Head of the Update Project at ICRC, by locating the GCI Updated Commentary into the legal landscape and applying the rules on treaty interpretation to the Geneva Conventions. Expect the post by the end of this month on this website, or get it directly in your mailbox.

Bringing the Pictet’s Commentary’s Legacy Into the 21st Century

In 2011 the ICRC embarked on a major project intended at updating its original Commentaries, drafted under the general editorship of Jean Pictet in the 1950s (for the Conventions), and of Yves Sandoz and other ICRC lawyers in the 1980s (for the Protocols).

Since their publication, these commentaries have become an authoritative interpretative guide for States, armed forces, national and international courts, academics and civil society. However, in order to remain relevant, they needed to be updated to reflect more than 60 years of subsequent developments in applying and interpreting the Geneva Conventions. With the release of the Commentary on GCI, an important milestone has been reached, with key findings related to GCI-specific articles but also common articles governing the scope of application of the Conventions and their enforcement.

The initial edition of the Commentaries mostly provided historical context for the adoption of the Conventions and their Additional Protocols, drawing on the negotiation process of the treaties, as well as practice prior to their adoption. In this respect, they retain their historic value. The updated Commentary builds on and preserves those elements that are still relevant, while incorporating more than six decades of application and interpretation of the Conventions – 40 years in the case of the 1977 Additional Protocols. Capturing the evolution of warfare and humanitarian challenges, as well as technological and legal developments, led to many additions but also updates.

The multi-faceted nature and complexities of today’s armed conflicts have also resulted in more elaborated interpretations on the scope of application of the law in armed conflict. The new Commentary aims to capture key elements of the ongoing debate about where, when, and to whom IHL applies, setting out the view of the ICRC while also indicating other interpretations.

The Commentary provides important clarifications on key aspects of the legal regime governing the protection of the wounded and sick in armed conflict. On the obligation to respect and protect the wounded and sick, it addresses issues ranging from taking their presence into account in a proportionality assessment when planning attacks, to the general obligation to have medical services in the first place. On the protection owed to medical personnel, it gives details on the conditions under which such protection may be lost. The new GCI Commentary also captures changes in the regulation of offers of services by impartial humanitarian organizations, on the dissemination of IHL, and on criminal repression. It also adds a number of subject matters, such as the prohibition of sexual violence and non-refoulement.

For more on the updated Commentaries project, see the Humanitarian Law and Policy’s post here.

We at Opinio Juris are very proud that our colleague Duncan Hollis of Temple University Law School was elected on June 15 by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States to the Inter-American Juridical Committee, which

…serves the Organization as an advisory body on juridical matters of an international nature and promotes the progressive development and the codification of international law.

It also studies juridical problems related to the integration of the developing countries of the Hemisphere and, insofar as may appear desirable, the possibility of attaining uniformity in their legislation.

No two members of the Committee may be from the same state and Duncan’s term will start in January 2017, at the end of David Stewart’s three years of service. Duncan is one of three new members of the Committee.

With his wide-ranging expertise on topics ranging from the law of treaties to the challenges that new technologies pose to International Humanitarian Law, Duncan will be a great addition to the Committee.  Congratulations!

I thought I had largely said what I had to say concerning emojis and international law in my previous post. SRSLY. 😉

But then John Louth, who knows of my interest in issues of recognition and non-recognition of aspirant states, pointed out this article from Wired which discusses, among other things, the issue of which national flags are awarded emoji and which are not. So let us return to the emoji for another post.

Consider the following passage for the Wired article:

…the most contentious emoji arena isn’t food, or even religion. It’s flags. From October 2010 until April 2015, there were a limited number of flag emoji, including the Israeli flag—but notably, no Palestinian flag. When the Palestinian flag was added—along with some 200 other flag emoji—it was cause for celebration.

Palestine exists in an unusual limbo in international law. It is recognized by some countries as Palestine, and by others as the Palestinian Territories.

“Technology has been used as a weapon to revolutionize the Middle East, and now it is being used as a weapon to legitimize Palestine,” wrote Palestinian columnist Yara al-Wazir at Al Arabiya earlier this year. “Introducing the Palestinian flag as an emoji is more than just a symbolic gesture.”

The article then goes on to note that some national groups, such as the Kurds, do not have flag emojis.

So, how does the Unicode Consortium, a non-state actor, decide whether to assign a symbol for the flag of an entity claiming to be a state, especially if that statehood is contested? (For more on the Unicode Consortium, please see my previous post.) The Consortium’s FAQ explains the criteria:

The Unicode Standard encodes a set of regional indicator symbols. These can be used in pairs to represent any territory that has a Unicode region subtag as defined by CLDR [Common Locale Data Repository], such as “DE” for Germany. The pairs are typically displayed as national flags: there are currently 257 such combinations. For more information, see Annex B: Flags in UTR #51.

In other words, the Consortium’s regional indicator symbols are based on the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO’s) two-letter country codes.

As described on its own website, the ISO is:

an independent, non-governmental organization made up of members from the national standards bodies of 162 countries. Our members play a vital role in how we operate, meeting once a year for a General Assembly that decides our strategic objectives.

Our Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, coordinates the system and runs day-to-day operations, overseen by the Secretary General.

It also describes itself as a network of national standard–setting bodies.  With its combination of a permanent secretariat as well as a bureaucratic network, the ISO has aspects of both an intergovernmental network and an international organization.  (See more on ISO governance, here.)

To receive a top-level country code from the ISO, an entity must be: (a) a United Nations member state, (b) a member of a UN specialized agency, or (c) a party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice.

Thus, the Unicode Consortium’s decision-making process to decide whether or not to assign a glyph for a country flag is based on the decision by the ISO, an organization with significant national government involvement, on whether or not a territory receives a country-code. The ISO’s decision is itself reliant on the aspirant entity’s relationship to the United Nations.

In short, the ISO has a two-letter designator for Palestine (see, for example, this ISO newsletter [.pdf]), so the Consortium by its own rules can (though does not have to) assign a code for the flag of Palestine. No ISO code for a Kurd state; no Kurdish flag emoji. And all of these stem from degrees of relationship of these entities to the UN.

In sum, a non-state consortium is basing its decisions on a state-based regulatory network (the ISO), which in turn is using criteria based on an intergovernmental organization (the UN). The result in the case of flag emojis is that the Consortium unlikely to assign a flag where the  ISO is not willing to assign a separate country code, and ISO will not assign such a code without first looking to UN practice.

Receiving a flag emoji is not the recognition of a state by another state or even by an interstate organization. Nonetheless there are many hurdles to the designation of a flag emoji. Given the significant state interest in issues of recognition, explicit or implied, this is not surprising.

And if readers find other interesting overlaps of the Unicode Consortium, emojis, and international law, please let me know!

Emojis: love them or hate them, you can’t seem to get away from them.  🙂  The smiley face, the thumbs-up, the smiling pile of poop, and the hundreds of other little symbols and pictograms that get used in text messages, tweets, and the like.  And tomorrow, June 21, we will have 71 new emojis to play with.  Why will there be new emojis tomorrow? And what does this have to do with international law? Read on…

First, a bit of background: while the smiley face is very much an iconic 1970’s symbol (“Have a Nice Day!’), the use of what we would call emoji in electronic communications started in the 1990’s in Japan, for use in cellphone texts.  Each little frowny face or thumbs-up, though, needs to be mapped using a common standard, or else it would only be able to be seen on certain platforms (say, an Android smartphone) but not on others (such as a Mac).

Consequently, there is actually an approved set of “official” emojis that can work across multiple software and hardware platforms and that new emojis are released once a year by a standard-setting organization called the Unicode Consortium, “a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.”  The Consortium’s membership includes Apple, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Yahoo, among others. By providing cross-platform standards, the Consortium is essentially making the soft law of the interoperability of symbols across different programs and devices. 😎

Proposals for new emojis are made to the Unicode Consortium, which then reviews and decides which symbols  should become standard and how they should be encoded. There are currently about 1,300 emojis, with about 70 added each year.   (By way of perspective the total  “Unicode Standard is mammoth in size, covering over 110,000 characters. “) The list of new emojis being released on June 21 is here.  Can’t wait to use the team handball emoji!

But, besides this being an unexpected story of industry standard-making bodies and funny little symbols, one must keep in mind that the Unicode Consortium’s responsibilities go well beyond encoding the broken heart glyph. As NPR reported last year:

The Unicode Consortium’s job has always been to make basic symbols work across all computers and other devices, but the emoji has put the group at the center of pop culture.

“Our goal is to make sure that all of the text on computers for every language in the world is represented,”

However, as Mashable notes:

getting characters added to the Unicode Standard is a long, drawn-out process. In addition to the original Japanese emoji characters, the Unicode additions included other new characters — such as country maps and European symbols.

What this means is that there is a data file that maps every individual emoji symbol to a Unicode code point or sequence.

But this is just the standardization of the symbols. Supporting emoji, as well as the specific design of the emoji characters, is up to software makers.

Thus, the administrative scaffolding that makes emojis ubiquitous is based on a non-governmental standard-setting body using soft law to allocate Unicode points or sequences to symbols (be they emojis, letters, mathematical symbols, etc.) that are approved by the Consortium.   The approval of emojis is simply one example of a set of responsibilities with much broader implications than just whether “nauseated face” deserves its own encoding. (According to the Consortium, it does.)

Besides interest in the process of institutional decision-making in standard-setting bodies such as the Consortium, there is also a question  of whether the Consortium’s overall goal of ensuring that the script of every language in the world is represented digitally is in tension the current focus on encoding more and more emoji.  Some have expressed concern that this focus on emojis may divert time and resources away from the protection of endangered languages. Peoples who are trying to preserve endangered languages (such as, for example, Native American and First Nation languages) would be greatly helped if the alphabet of that language would be as easy to read across a variety of computer platforms and digital devices as a smiley-face. Consider this an issue of resource allocation.  Letterjuice, a Brighton and Barcelona-based type foundry, posted a thoughtful essay on Unicode and language rights, which stated: Continue Reading…

Event

• Adjudicating international trade and investment disputes: between interaction and isolation The PluriCourts Centre of Excellence at the University of Oslo will host a two-day conference on international trade and investment disputes. The conference will take place on Thursday and Friday, August 25-26 at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, Norway. The webpage with the final programme and registration information is available here. For more information, please contact: Daniel Behn, PluriCourts (d [dot] f [dot] behn [at] jus [dot] uio [dot] no).

Calls for Papers

• The American Society of International Law’s Dispute Resolution Interest Group and Yale Law School’s Center for the Study of Private Law are hosting a workshop for junior scholars. The workshop will be a safe space in which aspiring and junior academics can get feedback through group discussion on academic works in progress in international dispute resolution. Authors will not give formal presentations of their work. Rather, each accepted paper will be assigned a discussant, who will briefly introduce the paper, provide feedback to the author, and lead a discussion among participants. This format permits lively discussion of ideas and writings that may be inchoate or not yet fully developed. Discussants may include other junior academics at Yale and other authors participating in the workshop.  The workshop will be held at Yale Law School on the afternoon of Friday, October 28, 2016. All participants will be expected to attend the entire workshop and to be prepared to comment on the other papers,up to a maximum of three. We are unfortunately unable to fund travel but will host a dinner in the evening.  500-700 word abstracts may be submitted by midnight Eastern Time,J uly 15, 2016 to this folder. Any topic related to international dispute resolution will be considered. Submissions must be works in progress and should not have been submitted for publication. The authors whose proposals are chosen will be informed by August 15th, 2016. All participants must submit a substantial work in progress by October 7, 2016, which will be circulated in advance of the workshop to registered attendees.  Please direct any questions to sadie [dot] blanchard [at] yale [dot] edu. The full call for papers is available here.
• The Hugo Valentin–Centrum of the Uppsala Universitet is pleased to announce a call for papers for its upcoming panel on “Emotional Warfare and its Limits: Towards an Affective Turn in International Humanitarian Law”, organized in the context of the International Conference on “Historicising International (Humanitarian) Law? Could we? Should we?” on 6–8 October 2016. When and why did the law of armed conflict become “humanitarian”? What role do fear, envy, or friendship play in the regulation of war? Can law offer an effective way out of the irrationality of violence? Possible answers to these questions cannot be addressed by means of strictly legal arguments, and should find place in other disciplines which have been traditionally permeated by an emotional discourse. This panel will discuss the conceptual debate on feelings such as hatred, resentment, compassion, nostalgia, fear, empathy/sympathy, jealousy, shame, humiliation, affection/love, among others, in order to examine international humanitarian law in its historical sense. Suggested topics may include (but not limited to): Emotions involved in the development of international humanitarian law; the role of emotions in the creation of customary international humanitarian law; and the affective expression of international States and non–state entities during armed conflicts. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by e-mail to Emiliano J. Buis (ebuis [at] derecho [dot] uba [dot] ar) and Ezequiel Heffes (ezequielheffes [at] gmail [dot] com) no later than July 18, 2016. Abstracts should be accompanied by name, affiliation and e-mail address. Proposals will be selected on the basis of their quality, originality, and thought–provoking capacity. Any questions about these themes or the suitability of a possible submission may be directed by e-mail to the abovementioned individuals.
• The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) invites submissions of scholarly papers for a conference on human rights and tax, to be held at NYU School of Law on September 22-23, 2016. The conference aims to develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which tax policy is a centrally important form of human rights policy, and to consider how the international human rights framework can best be used to promote greater equality and justice through the global tax regime. For years, resource constraints have been cited as the principal limitation on the ability of States to fulfill their human rights obligations, particularly when it comes to economic, social and cultural rights. Yet with few exceptions, human rights scholars and practitioners have shied away from core economic and financial debates, leaving the policies that shape resource availability and allocation largely in the hands of economists, tax and investment lawyers, and “development” experts. Those technocrats, in turn, have rarely paid heed to the expanding corpus of human rights law and its implications for State and non-State actors. There has been very little dialogue between tax and human rights experts, and even less scholarship on the intersection of these fields. CHRGJ’s conference aims to help fill that gap. See Call For Papers here for further details. Submission deadline is 1 July.
• Call for Abstracts: The American Society of International Law’s Dispute Resolution Interest Group and Yale Law School’s Center for Private Law are hosting a workshop for junior scholars. The workshop will be a safe space in which aspiring academics, post-docs, doctoral students, fellows, VAPs, other non-tenure-track academics, and pre-tenure professors can get feedback through group discussion on academic works in progress in international dispute resolution. The workshop will be held at Yale Law School on the afternoon of Friday, October 28, 2016. We are unfortunately unable to fund travel but will
  host a dinner in the evening. 500-700 word abstracts may be submitted by midnight Eastern Time, July 15, 2016. Any topic related to international dispute resolution will be considered. Submissions must be works in progress and should not have been submitted for publication. More details are available here.

Announcements

• The British Institute of International and Comparative Law is currently advertising for the Director of the Investment Treaty Forum and Senior Research Fellow in International Investment Law.
• The latest issue of Trade, Law and Development (Vol. 7, No. 1) [TL&D] has been published. The special issue is on Government Procurement.
• In 2015 the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University has taken over The Hague Prize for International which was established in 2002. With a view to continuing the Prize Maastricht University will collaborate with the Municipality of Maastricht. The main Prize will be awarded every five years to individuals who have made- through publications or achievements in the practice of law – a special contribution to the development of public international law or private international law or the advancement of the rule of law in the world. The Prize consists of a diploma, a monetary award of € 10.000,- and a drawing. The prize will be awarded for the first time in Maastricht on 8 December 2016. In the intervening years when the main Prize is not awarded, a Junior Prize will be awarded to promising younger academics in the field of human rights. The Junior prize will be awarded for the first time in 2018. It will carry a financial award of € 3.000,-.Recipients of the Hague Prize for International Law in the past included Prof. Shabtai Rosenne (2004), Prof. M. Cherif Bassiouni (2007), Dame Rosalyn Higgins (2009), Prof. Paul Lagarde (2011) and Prof. Georges Abi-Saab and Prof. Sir Elihu Lauterpacht (2013). The Board of the Maastricht Prize Foundation hereby invites anyone to nominate candidates who deserve such recognition for their contribution to international law. Nominations for the Prize will be accepted until 1 August 2016. Chairperson of the Nominating Committee is Prof. L. Lijnzaad. Reasoned recommendations for nominations should be sent to Prof. J. Vidmar, Secretary of the Nominating Committee, Maastricht University, Department of International and European Law, P.O. Box 616 Maastricht, The Netherlands, or by email:
  law-maastrichtprize [at] maastrichtuniversity [dot] nl by 1 August 2016. Additional information can be found on the website of the Maastricht Prize.

Our previous events and announcements post can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us with a one-paragraph description of your announcement along with hyperlinks to more information.

Foreign Policy has a great report from Michael Shifter on the ongoing diplomatic battle within the members of the Organization of American States over how to respond to Venezuela’s ongoing political and economic crisis.  According to Shifter, the OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro is pushing hard to get the OAS membership to invoke Article 20 of the OAS Democratic Charter at the upcoming June 23 special session.  Under Article 20, the Secretary General may ask the Permanent Council of the OAS to “collectively assess” as situation where there has been an “unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order in a member state.”   The Permanent Council can then undertake “necessary diplomatic initiatives, including good offices, to foster the restoration of democracy.”

The OAS Secretary-General has already issued a long 114 page report explaining why he believes (starting on p. 35) that there has been an “unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order” of Venezuela.  I haven’t been following the Venezuela situation closely, but this report certainly lays out a strong case.  Even more importantly in my view, it offers a good explanation of why members of the OAS have (via the Democratic Charter) a strong international legal obligation to democratic governance.

The penalties for breaching this obligation aren’t all that onerous.  Under Article 21, the OAS, via a special session, can suspend Venezuela from the OAS. I am not sure how likely this is to happen, given that Article 21 has a 2/3 majority requirement.

Still, I find this whole episode a fascinating example of how an international organization can become the key vehicle for influencing the domestic governance of one of its member states.  Key states are concerned about the crisis in Venezuela, and it looks like the OAS will be the chosen vehicle of (very soft diplomatic) intervention.

I am delighted to announce that OUP has just published Mark Kersten’s new book, Justice in Conflict: The Effects of the International Criminal Court’s Interventions on Ending Wars and Building Peace. Here is the press’s description:

What happens when the international community simultaneously pursues peace and justice in response to ongoing conflicts? What are the effects of interventions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the wars in which the institution intervenes? Is holding perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable a help or hindrance to conflict resolution? This book offers an in-depth examination of the effects of interventions by the ICC on peace, justice and conflict processes. The ‘peace versus justice’ debate, wherein it is argued that the ICC has either positive or negative effects on ‘peace’, has spawned in response to the Court’s propensity to intervene in conflicts as they still rage. This book is a response to, and a critical engagement with, this debate.

Building on theoretical and analytical insights from the fields of conflict and peace studies, conflict resolution, and negotiation theory, the book develops a novel analytical framework to study the Court’s effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. This framework is applied to two cases: Libya and northern Uganda. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the core of the book examines the empirical effects of the ICC on each case. The book also examines why the ICC has the effects that it does, delineating the relationship between the interests of states that refer situations to the Court and the ICC’s institutional interests, arguing that the negotiation of these interests determines which side of a conflict the ICC targets and thus its effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes.

While the effects of the ICC’s interventions are ultimately and inevitably mixed, the book makes a unique contribution to the empirical record on ICC interventions and presents a novel and sophisticated means of studying, analyzing, and understanding the effects of the Court’s interventions in Libya, northern Uganda – and beyond.

I’ve been following (and promoting) Mark’s work for a long time — since he was a PhD student at the LSE and had just started the blog Justice in Conflict. The blog has turned into a major player in the world of international criminal law, and I have no doubt that Mark’s book will have a significant impact on the field, as well. I’ve had the pleasure of reading it, and it’s excellent.

Buy Kersten! You’ll learn something and help better society, because Mark says that “OUP has agreed to make up to 200 copies of the book available, with all royalties I earn from sales of the book being used to pay for those copies to be shipped to libraries and universities across Africa, especially to those in ICC-affected countries.”

From our friends at ASIL comes word of the call for proposals for this year’s ASIL Research Forum. The deadline for proposals is July 11.  Here’s the text of the whole message:

The American Society of International Law calls for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the ASIL Research Forum to be held at ASIL Academic Partner University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, Washington, November 11-12, 2016.

The Research Forum, a Society initiative introduced in 2011, aims to provide a setting for the presentation and focused discussion of works-in-progress from across the spectrum of international law. Please note that – in addition to academics – private practitioners, government attorneys, international organization representatives, and non-government lawyers are frequently selected to present papers based on the abstracts they submit.

Papers may be on any topic related to international, comparative, or transnational law and should be unpublished at the time of their submission (for purposes of the call, publication to an electronic database such as SSRN is not considered publication). Interdisciplinary projects, empirical studies, and jointly authored papers are welcome. Multiple submissions are welcome, but authors will only be selected to present on a single abstract, including co-authored papers.

For full instructions and to submit a proposal, visit www.asil.org/researchforum. Submissions are due by 12 noon ET on Monday, July 11, 2016.

On behalf of Doughty Street Chambers, I want to publicise two Memorials — one in the Hague and one in London — that will be held in the next few weeks for John Jones QC, beloved friend and colleague, who tragically passed away in late April. Here is the information:

In order to celebrate the life and many personal and professional achievements of our much missed friend and colleague John Jones QC, two memorial events are organised in The Hague and London.

A celebration of John’s life will be held at The Hague Institute for Global Justice on Wednesday 29th June at 7.00pm followed by a reception (a map is available by clicking here).

There will also be a Memorial in London at Middle Temple Hall (click here for directions) on Wednesday 6th July starting at 5.00pm followed by a reception in Middle Temple gardens. The Hall will be accessible from 4.30pm.

For more details and RSVP, click here.

I hope everyone who knew and loved John will be able to attend one of the Memorials. I will be at the one in London in early July.

After about two months of public statements threatening to take the U.S. to the International Court of Justice over frozen Iranian assets, Iran finally instituted ICJ proceedings yesterday under the 1955 U.S.-Iran Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights.  Iran alleges in its complaint that the U.S. has violated the treaty’s obligations by taking Iranian government assets and redistributing them to families of U.S. marines killed in the 1983 Beirut bombing.  In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a 2012 congressional statute authorizing the seizure of Iranian government assets for distribution to the plaintiffs.

Iran argues that the U.S. government violated the 1955 Treaty in numerous ways by its failure to recognize the separate legal identity of the Iranian Central Bank and other state-owned companies and its failure to provide protection for such property as required by international law.  Iran further alleges that the U.S. conducted an expropriation of Iranian assets, while also denying access for those legal entities in US. court, while at the same time failing to respect their sovereign immunity, as well as other treaty violations.

Under paragraph 2 of Article 21 of the Treaty,

 

Any dispute between the High Contracting Parties as to the interpretation or application of the present Treaty, not satisfactorily adjusted by diplomacy, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice, unless the High Contracting Parties agree to settlement by some other pacific means.

I have previously tweeted on more than one occasion that the ICJ would have no jurisdiction, but I had forgotten about this provision (luckily someone reminded me on Twittter).  Believe it or not, Article 21 of the U.S-Iran Friendship Treaty has already been the basis for two prior ICJ proceedings: the U.S. case against Iran’s seizure of the U.S. embassy and its personnel (1979) and the Iranian case against U.S. actions against its Iranian oil platforms in 1992.  So it is clear that Article 21(2) is a legitimate basis for jurisdiction, and the ICJ held in both prior cases that this provision conferred jurisdiction upon it.

On the other hand, Article 21 limits a party’s claim to a “dispute…as to the interpretation or application of the present Treaty.”  This means Iran will have to limit its claim to violations of the treaty, rather than violations of general international law.  This is harder than it looks.  In the 2003 Oil Platforms judgment, the ICJ found that it had jurisdiction, and that U.S. attacks on the oil platforms were not justified on self defense. The ICJ nonetheless found that Iran’s claim that U.S. attacks on its oil platforms did not breach the “freedom of commerce” between the two nations, since no such commerce in oil was occurring at that time.  So the U.S. lost on jurisdiction, but won on the merits.

So I am going to reverse my earlier views and tentatively guess that the ICJ will find that it has jurisdiction over this case.  In particular, I think Iran will have a good argument that Article IV(2), which requires the U.S. give Iranian nationals’ property “the most constant protection and security within the territories of the other High Contracting Party, in no case less than that required by international law….” (emphasis added). I am not sure Iran is right that the U.S. violated Article IV(2), but I think Iran has a plausible argument that it could have been violated. That should be enough for jurisdiction.

I nonetheless expect the U.S. government to make a big fight over jurisdiction and admissibility. Even if it loses, the U.S. can slow down these proceedings tremendously by battling over jurisdiction and narrowing which claims Iran can bring forward.  This strategy worked very well in the Oil Platforms case.  Iran filed the proceedings in 1992. The ICJ did not issue an determination on jurisdiction until 1996.  The ICJ then took another seven years to finally issue a judgment on the merits in 2003 (which the U.S. won anyway).  With any luck, the U.S. could avoid a merits judgment here until 2027.

I think this case might move along more briskly, but it will still take a while.  And I think the slow wheels of international justice might work out for both sides here. Iran’s leaders can say they are doing something, but it will not result in any immediate judgment that will put the U.S. on the spot.  The U.S. can drag this out, and it might even prevail on the merits (I have no strong opinion on that complex issue yet).

I do not expect the U.S., however, to boycott of the entire proceedings, as China has been doing in the Philippines South China Sea arbitration.  For one thing, there is really no need, as I explained above, since we could be in for a 10 year wait for a judgment. For another, the U.S. needs to show that it plays nice with international law and courts to bolster its own calls on China to abide by the South China Sea arbitration.

This summer we will host our Fourth Annual Emerging Voices symposium, where we invite doctoral students and early-career academics or practicing attorneys to tell Opinio Juris readers about a research project or other international law topic of interest.

If you are a doctoral student or in the early stages of your career (e.g., post-docs, junior academics or early career practitioners within the first five years of finishing your final degree) and would like to participate in the symposium, please send a draft blog post somewhere between 1000-1500 words and your CV to opiniojurisblog [at] gmail [dot] com by July 6, 2016.

Submitted posts will then be reviewed by our editors. We’ll let you know by mid-July if your post will be included. Final essays will be posted on Opinio Juris in mid July through late August.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments or send us an e-mail at the address above.

There’s this musical on Broadway. It’s called Hamilton.  You might have heard of it. It’s causing legal scholars to say things like “I admired Hamilton since before he could rap,” and “My Shot has a pretty good lyric but have you tried Federalist no. 6?”

Anyway, a short note on A. Ham. and the law of nations seems in order.  For the following, I am particularly indebted to  Mark Janis’ book America and the Law of Nations 1776-1939 (Oxford 2010), David Bederman’s volume The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution: Prevailing Wisdom (Cambridge 2008) and Hamilton’s Republic (The New Press 1997), a compilation of writings by Alexander Hamilton and later “Hamiltonian” writers edited and introduced by Michael Lind. These authors and others writing about Hamilton do not necessarily come to the same conclusions regarding his views on what we now call international law, but rather provide  varying perspectives on a complex man.

By way of background, the views of the founders were in part shaped by their education in classical history as well as Enlightenment philosophy.  David Bederman, in his study of classical thought and the U.S. Constitution, wrote that “[s]tarting first with classical writers in Greek, the Framing generation particularly prized the works of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Polybius, and Plutarch, in that rising order of esteem.” (Bederman, 15.)   Thucydides’ international realism and Polybius’ conception of a “mixed constitution” combining monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy were especially influential on the founding generation. Hamilton was particularly fond of quoting Plutarch, whose biographies combine issues of public policy and state building with individual moral choice. (Bederman,16-17; 22.) Hamilton and other founders may have used “instrumental classicism,” to support their political arguments, but they also did a “reputable job in trying to make sense of antiquity,” with Hamilton among the “best” classicists. (Bederman, 228.)

Beyond classical history and philosophy, the founders were also influenced by Enlightenment philosophy and, as a group, were well-versed in the 18^th century law of nations and often referred to it in their writings. Mark Janis, in the first volume of his history of the United States and international law, argued that “[n]o group of America’s leaders have ever been more mindful of the discipline[of international law] than were the Founding Fathers.” (Janis, 24.)

In relation to studies in natural law at Kings College (later, Columbia University), Alexander Hamilton suggested in 1775 a reading list of “Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Burlemaqui.” (Janis, 24-25.) This shows, at least, his exposure to foundational texts of international law.  However, suggesting a reading list on natural law and actual application of the law of nations in practice are two different things. So, how concerned was Alexander Hamilton with the application of the law of nations to the “young, scrappy, and hungry” republic?

Here we can see some divergence in interpretation by scholars. Janis notes that in 1795 Hamilton Continue Reading…

Earlier this week, Julian and I each posted about the international legal issues of the Moon and asteroid mining plans of U.S. companies. Those projects may have sounded like something out of Space 1999 but now we hear of one of China’s near-term priorities that sounds like SeaLab 2020.

Bloomberg reports:

China is speeding up efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters.

Such an oceanic “space station” would be located as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface…

This would be by far the deepest long-term undersea facility (as opposed to a deep sea vessel, such as a submarine). By way of context, the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations Facility (NEEMO), the “world’s only undersea research station” is anchored at a depth of 62 feet.

China’s leadership explains that, in part, this base will help with a new frontier of resource development, using rhetoric that is at times similar to the arguments some make concerning private space ventures on the Moon and asteroids:

President Xi Jinping said at a national science conference in May: “The deep sea contains treasures that remain undiscovered and undeveloped, and in order to obtain these treasures we have to control key technologies in getting into the deep sea, discovering the deep sea, and developing the deep sea.”

But, beyond looking for deep sea resources, the concern is that the base is part of China’s gambit for sovereignty over much of the South China Sea.  However, while establishing this undersea platform may become part of China’s political argument for its sovereignty claims, it does nothing to support the legal argument. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), this undersea platform would probably be treated as an “artificial island,” like an oil rig.  At the time that UNCLOS was being drafted, large undersea bases were more the province of James Bond movies than treaty negotiations, so the closest analogy in the text is what would likely be applied in this case.  (For a discussion on sea platforms, “seasteading,” and sovereignty claims by non-state actors, see this post.)

Although it is not clear where the location of this undersea lab would be, UNCLOS has similar provisions concerning artificial islands located in an Exclusive Economic Zone (article 60) or on the continental shelf (article 80, which refers back to the article 60 text, with any applicable adjustments).

The text from article 60 states:

Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf.

So, in short, building this base would not change China’s territorial rights.

However, the concern is that, while it may not help the legal argument, another goal of the base may be to bolster the political argument with some military muscle. The Bloomberg article quotes the following:

“To develop the ocean is an important strategy for the Chinese government, but the deep sea space station is not designed against any country or region,” said Xu Liping, a senior researcher for Southeast Asian affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-run institute.

“China’s project will be mainly for civil use, but we can’t rule out it will carry some military functions,” Xu said. “Many countries in the world have been researching these kind of deep water projects and China is just one of those nations.”

Whether China actually builds this base–and if so, where–remains to be seen. If it does so, it will also be interesting to assess whether the base turns out to be most useful as a scientific research facility, a political gambit, or a military base.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington D.C. this week to meet with President Obama.  Buried in their joint statement, the two leaders reiterated their support for an important-sounding treaty that I, nonetheless, had never heard of:

27) The leaders affirmed their support for a UN Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism that advances and strengthens the framework for global cooperation and reinforces that no cause or grievance justifies terrorism.

The CCIT (draft text here) was proposed by India in 1996. In a nice illustration of just how slow the process of treaty making can take in the U.N. system, the treaty has languished in the 20 years since  in an “Ad Hoc Committee” and then in a “working group of the Sixth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly.”   Apparently, it continues to languish there due to disagreements over the application of its definition of terrorism to military forces and its application to “national liberation forces” (a 2014 public discussion is posted here).  Here is the definition in the draft text.

1. Any person commits an offence within the meaning of the present Convention if that person, by any means, unlawfully and intentionally, causes:
(a) Death or serious bodily injury to any person; or
(b) Serious damage to public or private property, including a place of public use, a State or government facility, a public transportation system, an infrastructure facility or to the environment; or
(c) Damage to property, places, facilities or systems referred to in paragraph 1 (b) of the present article resulting or likely to result in major economic loss; when the purpose of the conduct, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.

This is a pretty bland and uncontroversial definition.  The “working group” is supposed to be close to finalizing the text, but they have been “finalizing” since 2013.  It sounds like the treaty’s definition of terrorism needs an exemption for military forces (that seems doable) and an exemption for “liberation movements resisting foreign occupation” (that seems not so doable).

I suppose it would be a big deal if a CCIT was adopted since it would commit the world to a broad single definition of terrorism.  Then again, there are already at least 19 terrorism-related conventions, and it is hard to tell how much of a difference they make. The problem doesn’t seem to be a failure to sign international anti-terrorism treaties, but compliance with them.

On the other hand, there does seem to be value in pushing this position: “no cause or grievance justifies terrorism.”  This is a view that not only the U.S. and India, but also China, Russia, and the EU can get behind.  It will be interesting to see if this coalition can overcome the opposition of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) states who seem worried only about protecting the rights of the Palestinians to “resist” the Israeli occupation.  India seems gung-ho about this treaty, so it will be interesting to see if they can push it along (with U.S. help).

I know Opinio Juris is probably not where you come for sports updates but this is the result of the ConIFA World Football Cup, a tournament among unrecognized regimes, minorities, and stateless peoples.

For more on ConIFA, statehood, and nationalism, see my post from last week.  In short, the ConIFA competition may be an attempt not only to boost morale within unrecognized regimes, ethnic enclaves, and stateless people, but also remind the rest of the world of the claims that these groups have, be they claims of statehood or simply a desire to be recognized to exist as a people. Consider the following from an article posted by Al Jazeera:

…CONIFA’s president Per-Anders Blind explained how this World Cup has nothing to do with politics and borders.

“Our aim is to show that football can be a tool to bring our members to the global stage. We all have the same right to exist,” he said.

Chewing on a little pouch of “snus’, a Swedish chewing tobacco, Blind described how the idea for the CONIFA World Cup was inspired by his own life experience.

“My father is a reindeer herder in the Swedish and Norwegian mountains. I was born and raised as part of a group of forgotten people, the Sami, and endured discrimination because of that.”

Blind’s comments are reminiscent of the Olympic ideal to “use sport to foster peace and reconciliation, underlining the power of the Games to promote tolerance and solidarity among the participants, fans and people all over the world.”  Perhaps the founders of ConIFA were frustrated that membership international sports organizations such as the International Olympic Committee and (particularly relevant to ConIFA) FIFA, was too intertwined with statehood to extend these ideals to unrecognized regimes and stateless peoples. As the ConIFA website states, echoming the Olympic ideal,

CONIFA aims to build bridges between people, nations, minorities and isolated regions all over the world through friendship, culture and the joy of playing football. CONIFA works for the development of affiliated members and is committed to fair play and the eradication of racism.

But it can be difficult to set aside issues of politics, borders, and laws when the membership of ConIFA is practically defined by its tension with existing borders, politics,and/ or laws. While the structures of the International Olympic Committee and FIFA may favor recognized states, the tournament organization of ConIFA itself steps from the sports field into the arena of high politics.   Abkhazia, the Georgian breakaway region, not only won the tournament but was also the host. While the tournament may be a morale-booster for the population of Abkhazia, it was played in territory that Georgia views was taken from it by a Russian military invasion.   The Al Jazeera article notes that:

Georgian officials have complained that the CONIFA tournament is illegal since it it lacks Georgia’s authorisation within what it considers to be its territorial boundary. According to Georgian law, participants entering Abkhazia through Russia would be entering Georgian territory illegally.

The ConIFA World Football Cup symbolizes different things for different people. For some, it is an affirmation that they, too, matter. For others, the tournament is affront to the rule of law. And for some, it might just be a chance to watch the home team play a game of soccer. In any case, though, it matters.

Videos and summaries of the games are available at the ConIFA website. (And, by the way, Northern Cyprus beat ConIFA heavyweights Padania for the third place trophy.)

Well, Julian beat me to the punch by a few minutes, but here’s my take…

The Wall Street Journal reports:

U.S. officials appear poised to make history by approving the first private space mission to go beyond Earth’s orbit, according to people familiar with the details.

The government’s endorsement would eliminate the largest regulatory hurdle to plans by Moon Express, a relatively obscure space startup, to land a roughly 20-pound package of scientific hardware on the Moon sometime next year.

It also would provide the biggest federal boost yet for unmanned commercial space exploration and, potentially, the first in an array of for-profit ventures throughout the solar system.

Moon Express is a company looking towards extracting resources from the moon. They explain on their website:

Most of the elements that are rare on Earth are believed to have originated from space, and are largely on the surface of the Moon. Reaching for the Moon in a new paradigm of commercial economic endeavor is key to unlocking knowledge and resources that will help propel us into our future as a space faring species.

There are a variety of different business models for the growing commercial space industry. Some companies are focused on providing launch services for ferrying cargo and crew to orbit and beyond (SpaceX, United Launch Alliance), others have models based space “tourism” (Virgin Galactic), or providing the modular building blocks of space habitats (Bigelow Aerospace) or extracting resources from asteroids or the moon (Planetary Resources, Moon Express). It is this last business model, resource extraction,  that particularly challenges existing regulatory structures, the Outer Space Treaty and  the Moon Agreement.

The U.S. is not a party of the Moon Agreement. However, it is important to note that the Agreement states, in part:

Article 11

1.       The moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind, which finds its expression in the provisions of this Agreement and in particular in paragraph 5 of this article.

2.       The moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

3.       Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person. The placement of personnel, space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on or below the surface of the moon, including structures connected with its surface or subsurface, shall not create a right of ownership over the surface or the subsurface of the moon or any areas thereof. The foregoing provisions are without prejudice to the international regime referred to in paragraph 5 of this article…

7.       The main purposes of the international regime to be established shall include:

           (a)    The orderly and safe development of the natural resources of the moon;

           (b)    The rational management of those resources;

           (c)    The expansion of opportunities in the use of those resources;

           (d)    An equitable sharing by all States Parties in the benefits derived from those resources, whereby the interests and needs of the developing countries, as well as the efforts of those countries which have contributed either directly or indirectly to the exploration of the moon, shall be given special consideration.

[Emphases added.]

Julian and others discussed similar provision in the Outer Space Treaty in relation to asteroid mining in  these posts and  comments: 1, 2.

Based on this text,  some have argued that one cannot mine the Moon or asteroids for private profit.  Julian has set out in his posts an interpretation of the OST language that would allow private ventures.  Others, such as Richard Bilder, have concluded that the regulatory uncertainties regarding mining the Moon argues in favor of constructing a clear multilateral legal regime.

International law can play an important role in this burgeoning field. Rather than attempting to ban such mining enterprises, international law can provide a framework so that such ventures can have greater certainty and better assess risks, as well as have certain limits on their activities. A multilateral agreement can recognize the property rights of companies extracting resources, define where resources can and cannot be extracted, define a regime of noninterference among mining ventures (there are broader noninterference norms in the existing OST and Moon Agreement), and so on. Such an agreement would appreciate the opportunities of this new frontier of exploration and economic activity but also provide some reasonable bounds to avoid conflict, avoid the wasteful degradation of asteroids or the moon, and ban certain activities that could endanger the public. I am skeptical of any attempts, though, at large-scale wealth redistribution. That did not work in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (and needlessly hampered the acceptance of an important treaty)  and I see no reason why there would be a different outcome here.

This is why the U.S.’s taking a step forward to approve a private mission my a moon mining company has significant implications.  The Journal continues:

The expected decision, said the people familiar with the details, is expected to set important legal and diplomatic precedents for how Washington will ensure such nongovernmental projects comply with longstanding international space treaties. The principles are likely to apply to future spacecraft whose potential purposes range from mining asteroids to tracking space debris.

Approval of a formal launch license for the second half of 2017 is still months away…

But this is only the first of many steps that U.S. companies may be taking in private space exploration. Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX plans to send an uncrewed lander to Mars around 2018 and a crewed mission around 2026. If that timetable holds, and if states do not jumpstart their Mars programs then the first person on Mars will have been sent by a private company, not a national space program (The key word, of course, being “if.”) I believe the current NASA scenario is to land a crew sometimes in the mid 2030’s.

Although US companies are currently the main actors in these private space ventures, that will not always be the case.  These are early days, still. The “commercial space race” is still among toddlers. But those baby steps quickly become small steps. And then giant leaps.

To answer the question of the title of this post: should the U.S. approve this commercial moon mining venture? If it meets U.S. regulatory requirements and in the absence of clear international law to the contrary: Yes.

But it is also in the interest of American companies, and the US as a whole, to clarify multilateral regulations concerning the commercial exploitation of the Moon and other celestial bodies.  Now is the time to define some ground rules for everyone in the space race.

This is big.  Huge, even. From the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. officials appear poised to make history by approving the first private space mission to go beyond Earth’s orbit, according to people familiar with the details.

The government’s endorsement would eliminate the largest regulatory hurdle to plans by Moon Express, a relatively obscure space startup, to land a roughly 20-pound package of scientific hardware on the Moon sometime next year.

The main obstacles to this commercial moon mission are not technical or financial. The main problem appears to be legal.  First, the U.S. government must approve the launch (this appears to be happening soon).  Second, the U.S. and the world need to figure out how to regulate commercial exploitation of the moon, because companies like “Moon Express” are not in this for the science alone.  The Moon Treaty seems to prohibit any commercial exploitation of the Moon’s resources under Article 11 (“[N]atural resources of the moon… shall [not] become the property of any ..person”), but the U.S. never ratified it and neither did any of the other major spacefaring nations.

So we are left to the “Outer Space” treaty, which the U.S. did join, but which has much less emphatic limitations on commercial development of celestial resources (as I argued here and here).  I think it is safe to say commercial exploitation of the moon and asteroids is going to happen sooner than we think (starting next year?).  The law will have to catch up later.

[Caroline Kaeb is Assistant Professor of Business Law and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.  David Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. They are co-chairs of the Working Group on Business and Human Rights of the U.N. Global Compact’s Principles for Responsible Management Education.]

The corporate world is struggling with two competing visions of corporate ethics as the governance gap in national capitals stymies effective responses to global challenges.

The first vision gaining steam in recent years has been a form of corporate activism we call “corporate counterattack.”   Some major multinationals are increasingly challenging and indeed changing poorly conceived government policies or occupying the policy void.

Take the United States. Last year Apple, Angie’s List, Anthem, SalesForce, Roche Diagnostics, Cummins, Eli Lilly, and companies headquartered in Indiana successfully brought heat down on Governor Mike Pence to amend legislation that had allowed businesses, citing religious freedom, to discriminate against gays and lesbians.  The uproar caused the state initially to lose perhaps dozens of conferences and $60 million of anticipated revenue. Walmart similarly counterattacked against discriminatory legislation in Arkansas.

Google and other multinational corporations in the deep South balk at operating in states that glorify the Confederate flag or enact legislation undermining minority rights.  The latest examples are North Carolina and Mississippi, where laws discriminating against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have prompted strong corporate reactions. PayPal cancelled a $3.6 million investment in North Carolina. Google Ventures froze new investments in the state and other companies are reconsidering their plans. Over 140 CEOs and business leaders of such corporations as Facebook, Bank of America, and Apple signed an open letter to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory opposing that state’s new law. Such giant corporate employers as Tyson Foods, Nissan, Toyota, and MGM Resorts International have loudly protested Mississippi’s regressive law. These collective business voices challenge state governments to protect human rights while such public authorities seek their corporate investments.

Meanwhile, in Europe some corporations have addressed the humanitarian crisis swamping that continent with philanthropy and commitments to train and employ migrants, including refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa. A newly-formed partnership of companies, including McDonald’s, MasterCard, Facebook, and DreamWorks Animation, generates private funds for the World Food Programme to feed millions of migrants by providing free ad time and access to digital promotion.

This stands in contrast to the chaos that unfolded on the European continent as governments swung further to the right and shut their borders, lacking any “big ideas” as human misery cloaked the endless flow of destitute individuals. The governance gap in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East shows few signs of narrowing, thus assigning even greater responsibility to corporations that are willing to act boldly and innovatively to address humanitarian needs.

In early 2015 Sony Corporation marketed “The Interview,” not only for revenue but also in defense of freedom of expression after North Korea, or its agents, apparently launched cyber-attacks on the company so as to intimidate it into locking up the comedy critical of Kim Jong-un.

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, internet giants struggle to find the right balance between privacy and security in the face of calls for more government surveillance and information sweeps that would impinge upon privacy rights globally.  For example, Apple recently refused a lower federal court order to reverse engineer a dead terrorist’s locked iPhone in San Bernardino, California, so as to gain password access and thus assist the FBI in its investigation of the deadly terrorist attack in that city. Ultimately the FBI used other means to access the iPhone.

National security concerns are of vital importance. But Washington’s insistence that Apple develop software to unlock the privacy of the iPhone is potentially dangerous. It exposed Apple and other cyberspace companies to comparable demands by repressive governments and even other democracies that will be inspired to compel corporate complicity in undermining human rights protections for spurious national security priorities. Among the victims might be human rights activists and political dissidents seeking to advance principles embodied in the American Bill of Rights and international human rights treaties.

In defense of freedom of expression, Google has fiercely challenged an extension of the European privacy right to be forgotten to non-European Union internet domains (such as google.com), regardless of whether the information was accessed from within the EU or anywhere else in the world. This is an example of competing public policy priorities that need to be weighed and possibly balanced with one another, and business has a vital role to play in that process.

None of these companies perfectly embraces principles of social responsibility and sometimes they overlook human rights or environmental standards in one part of the world while embracing them in other societies.  But there is no shortage of opportunities being seized by multinational corporations to significantly influence the protection of human rights and advance worthy social policy goals.  Fifteen years of growing corporate participation in the United Nations Global Compact, with its pledges on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption, demonstrate a mindset shift that generates constructive societal contributions and a growing body of counterattacks against regressive or failed public policies.

However, there are fierce winds blowing against such initiatives.  The second and darker vision of corporate ethics remains wedded to short-term profits regardless of societal impact and even if fraudulently obtained.  The colossal Volkswagen deceit, where 11 million diesel-fueled and supposedly eco-friendly vehicles were apparently rigged to cheat on emissions tests, blatantly screamed “go to hell” to corporate social responsibility.  Coca-Cola paid scientists to argue that physical exercise is the antidote to high-sugar drinks, so consumers were encouraged to keep chugging and then jogging off the fat while Coke prospers.

General Motors, which settled with the Justice Department for $900 million, ignored and then delayed reacting to an ignition flaw in its vehicles that resulted in 124 deaths and 275 serious injuries. One young tycoon, indicted on securities fraud, shamelessly inflated the price of a 62-year old drug to treat serious infections from $13.50 to $750 and thought that was just fine in a world ruled by hedge funds.  A chief executive was recently sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly shipping peanut butter laced with salmonella, killing nine people and inflicting illness on at least 700 others.

Without waiting for government mandates, major corporations are joining a growing global coalition to convert to renewable energy sources.  But for decades Exxon Mobil aggressively funded climate change deniers despite the role of carbon-based fuels in that scientifically proven man-made phenomenon. Over the years, 62 resolutions have been introduced at shareholder meetings to compel the company to confront the reality of climate change in its operations and investments. But management and a majority of shareholders have voted down each of those resolutions, including 11 of them at the last shareholders meeting in May. Divestment campaigns by activists continue to dog Exxon Mobil. At least Rex Tillerson, the company’s chief executive, recently reiterated Exxon Mobil’s support for a carbon tax and further studies of the “risk” of climate change.

Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is now serving a one-year sentence in federal prison following the deaths of 29 miners he employed. He must have thought, as he managed one of the largest energy companies in America, that he could somehow evade fundamental coal mine safety standards and speak and act as if he was just barely crawling out of the Dark Ages of labor rights, and hence human rights.   If Blankenship took just one refresher course at any leading business school today, could he possibly walk out of that class with the same reckless views he exhibited on the job for years? Perhaps he would, which is why focusing on what business schools, and what they teach business students in core management classes as well as business practitioners in their executive programs, is important to review and get right. This entails teaching the protection, enforcement, and indeed advancement of human rights and other societal imperatives within the corporate world. It is in business schools in particular where it all starts, to shape the students’ minds to do rights-based business in the 21^st Century.

This duel between corporate responsibility and corporate deceit and culpability is no small matter.  The fate of human society and of the earth increasingly falls on the shoulders of corporate executives who either embrace society’s challenges and, if necessary, counterattack for worthy aims or they succumb to dangerous gambits for inflated profits, whatever the impact on society.

The fulcrum of risk management must be forged with sophisticated strategies that propel corporations into the great policy debates of our times in order to promote social responsibility and thus strengthen the long-term viability of corporate operations.  We believe that task must begin in business schools and in corporate boardrooms where decisions that shape the world are made every day.

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Africa

• Chad’s ex-ruler Hissene Habre has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison at a landmark trial in Senegal.
• Ivory Coast’s former first lady Simone Gbagbo goes on trial on Tuesday for crimes against humanity, but rights groups acting as plaintiffs in the case have pulled out saying the proceedings are flawed.
• United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked the Security Council to add just over 2,500 peacekeepers to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, which has been hit by a series of deadly attacks, according to a new U.N. report.
• A commander believed to have orchestrated the 2015 deadly attack on Kenya’s Garissa University has been killed in a special forces raid in southern Somalia, a top local official said.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• The bodies of 133 migrants have washed up on the shore at the western Libyan city of Zuwara in recent days, the Red Crescent said on Sunday.
• Nearly 50 air strikes hit rebel-held areas in and around the Syrian city of Aleppo on Sunday in some of the heaviest recent raids by Russian and Syrian government aircraft, residents and a monitoring group said.
• The United Nations has said it will ask permission from the Syrian government on Sunday to airdrop or airlift humanitarian aid to besieged areas.

Asia

• China aims to speed up the signing of extradition treaties with countries where corruption suspects have fled to, a senior official wrote in state media, as Beijing steps up its overseas hunt for citizens suspected of corruption.
• Taiwan’s new defense minister said on Monday the island would not recognize any air defense zone declared by China over the South China Sea, as the island’s top security agency warned such a move could usher in a wave of regional tension.
• Vietnam and South Korea are looking seriously at buying refurbished Lockheed Martin Corp P-3 and S-3 maritime surveillance planes to counter China’s military buildup and repeated North Korean missile launches, the company said.
• At least five people were killed on Sunday when Tliban gunmen attacked a courthouse in eastern Afghanistan, an attack the insurgent group said was in retaliation for the government execution of six militants in May.

Europe

• Lawyers have filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights to halt the deportation of a homosexual Syrian refugee who was denied asylum in Greece, a German advocacy group said on Friday.
• Migrants who try to enter Europe illegally by boat should be denied the chance to apply for asylum and be sent back, Austria’s foreign minister said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
• A British exit from the European Union would not end the idea of a unified Europe and should not be seen as a “horror scenario”, European Parliament Vice President Alexander Lambsdorff said in a German radio interview.

Americas

• China has already made its position clear about its foreign minister berating a Canadian journalist who asked a question about human rights, China’s Foreign Ministry said, after Canada issued a complaint about the minister’s behavior.
• Puerto Rico has taken the first steps toward opening a commercial office in Cuba, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said on Saturday, on the sidelines of a Caribbean summit in Havana.
• Gang violence is forcing thousands of Hondurans to leave their homes every month to seek safety in other neighborhoods and provinces of the Central American nation, a problem that is invisible but growing, says the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR).

Oceania

• One of Australia’s leading human rights organisations has spoken out in support of the retention of a mural in Darwin’s central business district that depicts the West Papuan Morning Star flag.

UN/World

• UN Secretary-General and other speakers in Security Council voice concern over evolution of sexual violence into ‘tactic of terrorism’; (see report here [.pdf]).
• United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon slammed the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting in Yemen for killing and maiming children by adding it to an annual blacklist of states and armed groups that violate children’s rights during conflict.
• The international community must work together together to tackle the alarming growth of environmental crime, a leading UN official has told Al Jazeera.

Event

• Between Europe and the United States: The Israeli Supreme Court in Comparative Perspective is being held Monday, June 27, 2016 – 9:00am to 6:00pm at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. For more information, click here. Despite a shared commitment to constitutional norms and a shared intuition that constitutional norms reflect universal principles, the United States and Europe interpret constitutional norms in markedly different ways. To take but one example, European privacy norms are shaped largely around the concept of dignity and inherited ideas of honor, whereas American privacy norms have historically rested on the value of liberty, especially liberty vis-à-vis the government. Both systems shape constitutional norms against the background of their distinct social and political traditions. Israel is poised between these two older legal cultures and is in dialogue with both. Does Israeli constitutional jurisprudence share more with Europe or with the United States?  Do particular social and political ideas within Israeli legal culture account for the disparate alliances? What are the particular areas in which Israel shows an affinity for one or the other, or neither, legal tradition?
  The conference is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is requested. Please email ISCP [at] yu [dot] edu with your name, affiliation and contact information.

Call for Papers

• Gas: we breathe it, we burn it, we weaponise it, we control it. Whether banned, regulated or free-flowing, gas is our immediate environment, connecting us, keeping us warm, keeping us cool, creeping through the cracks. Explosive or sedative, it facilitates killing and curing alike. Gas leaks, escapes, and traverses boundaries, including legal boundaries. Certain gases are subject to international law, but even the most regulated gases may escape, or be unleashed. The London Review of International Law invites submissions on the subject of gas. These may touch on specific regimes regulating particular gases or groups of gases, they might look at historical processes centring on the control or release of (manufactured or natural) gases, or they might focus on the background role gas has played behind international legal processes, whether in relation to energy, climate, war, or simply the conditions of lawmaking, law enforcement, or legal speculation. Guidelines for submissions can be found under ‘Instructions to Authors’. In addition to articles, proposals for review essays and photographic (or other image-based) essays will be very welcome. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to a [dot] z [dot] wu [at] lse [dot] ac [dot] uk?subject=CFP%202017%20special%20issue%20on%20the%20theme%20of%20%27gas%27″>Aaron Wu (a [dot] z [dot] wu [at] lse [dot] ac [dot] uk) not later than 15 June 2016. Respondents will be notified of the outcome of their proposal not later than 1 July 2016.

Announcements

• Oil Gas and Energy Law 2 (2016) is now out – Emerging Issues in Polar Energy Law and Governance, prepared by Dr Tina Hunter (Aberdeen University Centre for Energy Law), this special on Emerging Issues in Polar Energy Law and Governance provides a up-to-date analysis of many aspects of a rapidly changing region, and the legal issues that dominate the Polar regions.
• Di Tella University, from Argentina, is delighted to announce that the fourth issue of the Latin American Journal of International Law (Revista Latinoamericana de Derecho Internacional -LADI-) is now available online. The Journal is the first Latin American publication devoted to promoting the discussion of general topics of Public International Law from different perspectives in the region. LADI’s fourth issue includes articles by William Schabas, Roberto Gargarella, and Alejandro Chehtman, as well as discussions about international criminal law in the Americas, the role of international law in the early history of Latin America, and foreign debt restructuring, amongst others. The latest issue can be found here.  

Our previous events and announcements post can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us with a one-paragraph description of your announcement along with hyperlinks to more information.

States and nations are not the same thing.  A nation is a “people,” itself a difficult concept to define under international law. A state is a recognized political entity that meets certain criteria. International lawyers will tell you that the characteristics of statehood include a defined territory, a government, a permanent population, and the ability to enter into foreign relations.

State formation in the 19^th century and also right after World War I often sought to build states for nations (hence the term “nation-state”) but the terms are not coterminous.

So what are the hallmarks of nationhood? Many know in their hearts that there may be no more important mark of nationhood than a national soccer team. C’mon, you know it’s true.

And sometimes, peoples would like to remind you that they are nations—if not states!—and want to be recognized as such (nations or states, it gets a little blurry).

So, pay attention, soccer fans and international lawyers, because this weekend will be the final match in the 2016 Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA) World Football Cup, sometimes referred to as the World Cup of the unrecognized.  According to this NPR report, host Abkhazia is the current favorite after Western Armenia and Kurdistan were unexpectedly eliminated.

The first ConIFA World Football Cup was played in 2014 and seems to be the successor to the VIVA World Cup, about which I had previously written.

ConIFA should not be confused with FIFA, the international federation of football associations. As I had explained in a post from a couple of years ago, membership in FIFA is not based on being a state, but rather on being a football association.  Thus, if you look at a list of FIFA member associations, as England and Wales are separate associations, they have separate World Cup teams. Nonetheless, joining FIFA can be subject at times to some of the same political tensions as the recognition of a state.

According to FIFA’s statutes (.pdf), to be eligible to become a member of FIFA, an applicant must first be a member of one of the six main football confederations: the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL), the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), the Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA), the Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF), the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), or the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). Without going into all the statutes of these individual confederations, it is likely that some vote among the existing member associations in a given confederation will be a first hurdle that an aspirant FIFA-member must pass. (See, for example, UEFA’s rules (.pdf).)

Thus, although membership in FIFA is technically not based on statehood, the process largely relies on statehood and state-based football organizations (but for noted exceptions, such as England and Wales). Consequently, unrecognized entities such as South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh have little chance of seeing their football associations become part of a confederation, let alone FIFA.

Now consider ConIFA’s  membership rules, which are linked not to statehood, but to “nationhood” or being a “people”:

CONIFA is made for national teams that represent a nation which is not a member of FIFA (yet). For that reason only non-members of FIFA can join CONIFA. The second requirement is that the applicant is represent of a nation. The following table explains in detail what we consider a “nation”:

1.The Football Association is a member of one of the six continental confederations of FIFA.

2. The entity represented by the Football Association is a member of the IOC.

3. The entity represented by the Football Association is a member of one of the member federations of ARISF.

4. The entity represented by the Football Association is in possession of an ISO 3166-1 country code.

5. The entity represented by the Football Association is a de-facto independent territory.

6. The entity represented by the Football Association is included on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories.

7. The entity represented by the Football Association is included in directory of countries and territories of the TCC.

8. The entity represented by the Football Association is a member of UNPO [Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization] and/or FUEN [Federal Union of European Nationalities].

9. The entity represented by the Football Association is a minority included in the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples.

10. The entity represented by the Football Association is a linguistic minority, the language of which is included on the ISO 639.2 list.

Every Football Association that fulfills at least one of the above criteria is very welcome to apply for CONIFA membership!

[Emphases and bracketed text added.]

As for the aspiration of at least some of these entities to become generally recognized as states, consider the parenthetical “(yet)” from the first sentence.

And why might a a sports tournament be important to people with much bigger issues to worry about? Because you can cheer your team, wave your flag, feel a sense of unity, sing when your winning and… yes, you can actually win. And if you don’t there’s always next year.

When you live in an unrecognized regime, you take your wins where you can get them.

Whether any of these associations become part of FIFA, let alone whether or not those entities that also seek to be recognized as states will ever achieve that goal, is a long and doubtful journey.  But in many cases that is due to reasons of military intervention, history, and/or international law. For today, there is a football to be played.

Earlier today, President Obama took time out during his commencement address at the Air Force Academy to make a pointed plea for the value of treaty-making.  Here’s the relevant excerpt from his remarks:

By the way, one of the most effective ways to lead and work with others is through treaties that advance our interests.  Lately, there’s been a mindset in Congress that just about any international treaty is somehow a violation of American sovereignty, and so the Senate almost never approves treaties anymore.  They voted down a treaty to protect disabled Americans, including our veterans, while Senator and World War II veteran Bob Dole was sitting right there in the Senate chambers in a wheelchair.

We don’t always realize it, but treaties help make a lot of things in our lives possible that we take for granted — from international phone calls to mail.  Those are good things.  Those are not a threat to our sovereignty.  I think we can all agree on that.

But also from NATO to treaties controlling nuclear weapons, treaties help keep us safe.  So if we’re truly concerned about China’s actions in the South China Sea, for example, the Senate should help strengthen our case by approving the Law of the Sea Convention — as our military leaders have urged.  And by the way, these treaties are not a new thing.  The power to make treaties is written into our Constitution.  Our Founding Fathers ratified lots of treaties.  So it’s time for the Senate to do its job and help us advance American leadership, rather than undermine it.  (Applause.)

Three paragraphs is not much to fully articulate U.S. interests in treaty-making (let alone give a balanced overview of the arguments over UNCLOS).  Thus, I think the more noteworthy thing here is the fact that the remarks are coming from the President himself.  It’s one thing to call out the Senate on a specific treaty like the Disabilities Convention, but this slap is more systemic. President Obama has not had a good record when it comes to making treaties through the Article II Advice and Consent process.  With the exception of the new START treaty, the Senate has refused to act on most treaties, including certain types of treaties (e.g., tax treaties, fish treaties) that in prior Administrations were entirely uncontroversial.  Thus, we might see this speech as a late shift in strategy, where the White House is moving off treaty-specific pro’s and con’s to reconstruct this issue in constitutional terms.  I’m not too sanguine that the move will be any more successful at getting votes on pending treaties, but the Senate’s response (if any) will bear watching.

What do others think?  Is there anything I’m missing here?

[UPDATE: An astute reader points out that I was incorrect to cite fish treaties as an example of Senate hostility to treaty-making.  In fact, all four treaties that have received Senate advice and consent since 2012 involved fish; in other words, fish treaties are the only treaties that have gotten through in the last four years.  Tax treaties and treaties on scientific cooperation and conservation, which in the past were, like fish treaties, non-controversial, are better examples of the ongoing hostility to treaty-making]