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]

Simple vs. Compound Interest

Further to our discussion in class last week, and in preparation for discussing reparations this week, here is the old post on simple versus compound interest:


On the difference between compound and simple interest, here is a link to a spreadsheet that illustrates the power of compound interest. It includes the formulas you can use to calculate straight-forward compound interest.

Important to note is that an investment of $15,000 in an account earning compound interest, calculated and paid monthly, at a rate of 6% per annum, will earn $31,653.07 more in interest over a 20 year period, than an account earning simple interest at the same rate over the same period.

Compound interest is even more powerful when the principal is increasing with each period. So, if you took $2 each week (the amount you might be tempted to spend on lottery tickets), and invested it in an account earning 6% per annum compounded monthly (admittedly impossible to find in the current environment), at the end of 40 years your account (in which you would have only invested $4,160 over the 40 years) would be worth $15,953, or close to four times your investment. Make that $20 instead of $2, and the amounts become more interesting.

You can find a straight compound interest calculator here, and one which includes the addition of monthly contributions to principal  here.

More on Secession, Self-Determination and Catalonia

As you will all have seen from recent headlines, the secession issue in Spain has taken a turn for the worse, with what is developing as a crisis heading in to uncharted waters. Here is one of a series of blog posts on the legal issues surrounding the Catalonian claim. The risk of civil war is not trivial.

[Update] - this article is quite a good backgrounder on the entire Catalonian crisis.