Another Development in Climate Law

After Thanksgiving we will take up international environmental law. In addition to the Bonn conference that was ongoing last week, and about which I posted, this week there are developments in relation to the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on HFCs, as explained in this article. We will certainly discuss this in class, so please read this.

Human Rights Naming and Shaming - Australia

Last week I posted a link to an article recounting how the Human Rights Committee had found Australia responsible for violations of the ICCPR rights of detained refugee claimants in Papua New Guinea. Today's New York Times has a prominent piece on the issues. This helps to illustrate how the mechanisms of the monitoring and observations system puts pressure on countries. Australia will most certainly feel the pressure of this kind of criticism in The New York Times, which was in turn a direct result of the Human Rights Committee's observations.

Back to Prescriptive Jurisdiction

Here is a short blog post explaining an application for certiorari to the Supreme Court in a case that involves the issue of extraterritorial application of American Anti-Trust law. If the Court takes up the case, it may lead to interesting new developments in the how the U.S. understands and applies international law principles on the the extraterritorial exercise of prescriptive jurisdiction.

Decisions Facing Congress on Torture

This post in Just Security from this week explores how Congress is facing a number of decisions that will test our commitment to the prohibition on torture going forward. It also, in the first few paragraphs, recounts how the CIA has mishandled its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.

Election of ICJ Judges

This last week saw the election of judges to the ICJ. As this account explains, it was an eventful election, with the British judge not winning re-election on the first ballot. But the article gives a good sense of how the elections work, and some of the dynamics in play.

Climate Change Talks This Week

We will not get to climate change and environmental law for another week or so, but there are important negotiations underway this week in Bonn, which you may want to read about before we get to the topic in class. The U.S. has a small delegation taking part, and many American cities and some states are also represented at the talks, notwithstanding the Trump administration's stated intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. As you probably know, while having stated the intention, the U.S. cannot withdraw until 2020 under the terms of the treaty.

Recent Developments on Extraterritoriality of ICCPR and HRC Reporting

There have been recent developments that help to highlight aspects of our discussion this week about the extraterritorial application of the ICCPR, and on the monitoring and reporting function of the Human Rights Committee! This week the Human Rights Committee held, in its Concluding Observations to Australia's latest Periodic Report, that Australia was responsible for the human rights violations suffered by refugee claimants being held in Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea. It did so on the basis that Australia was exercising "effective control" over their situation. More background on the crisis on Manus Island can be found here.

Jurisdiction and the ICC

The Hague Prosecutor announced last week that she would request permission from the ICC to pursue charges for crimes committed in relation to the conflict in Afghanistan - which would within its scope the conduct of US forces in Afghanistan, as well as the conduct of the CIA at "Dark Sites" interrogating persons captured in Afghanistan. Consider how jurisdiction is being exercised here, against the US, even though the US is not a party to the Rome Statute (the ICC treaty).

[Update - here is another good analysis of the situation from a European perspective]