Book Review: Solon Solomon, The Justiciability of International Disputes – The Advisory Opinion of Israel’s Security Fence as a Case Study

Solon Solomon, The Justiciability of International Disputes – The Advisory Opinion of Israel’s Security Fence as a Case Study (Jerusalem: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2009) ISBN: 978-90-5850-437-1 By Dr. Fozia Nazir Lone Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong, fnlone@cityu.edu.hk Solon Solomon, in this book presents a comprehensive legal description on the justiciability of international disputes. [...]

Is there a need to establish new international courts?

New initiatives have been aired recently in high political circles about creating two new courts to deal respectively with piracy off the Horn of Africa (stemming from Somalia), which continues to make headlines, and nuclear security issues. Not long ago, there was a Dutch proposal that the UN should support the establishment of a tribunal [...]

The Case for an International Piracy Court

We have at several occasions here on International Law Observer raised the question of whether or not an international (ad hoc) court (could/) should be established to try pirates (see for example here, here, here and here). On Tuesday (27. April) the UNSC unanimously adopted a resolution in which a next and important step in this [...]

Book Review: Democracy Goes to War – British Military Deployments under International Law

Nigel D. White, Democracy Goes to War – British Military Deployments under International Law (Oxford: OUP, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-0-19-921859-2  Nigel D. White, Professor of International Law at the University of Sheffield, in this book presents a clear doctrinal narrative on a very sensitive issue of the use of military force and peacekeeping.  The book specifically [...]

Book Review – The War on Terror and the Laws of War: A Military Perspective

Michael Lewis, Eric Jensen, Geoffrey Corn, Victor Hansen, Richard Jackson and James Schoettler , The War on Terror and the Laws of War: A Military Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2009) ISBN13: 978-0-19-538921-0ISBN10: 0-19-538921-2 This book is written by six American legal scholars with experience as members of the legal profession in the US armed forces. [...]

Administrative Detention – A Rule, No Longer An Exception

Administrative detention has been a contentious topic for international lawyers since its invocation by governments claiming that it is a principal tool in the often-lawless global ‘War on Terror’. Despite the popularity that this mechanism has earned amongst a growing number of states, principally those participating in the ‘War on Terror’, it has been neglected [...]

The possible transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners to Georgia

On August 20, 2009 the Washington Post reported that the US administration was making progress in resettling detainees from Guantanamo Bay. According to the article, six European Union countries – Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain – have agreed to receive the inmates. Four EU countries have privately told the US administration that they [...]

Reality TV Catching up with the Terrorists

If you fancy combining the job of hunting down terrorists with a career on TV then The Wanted, aired on NBC Monday night, might just be something for you. NPR has the story. Maybe some of our American-based readers who happened to watch it can shed some light on the programme. In the programme, the [...]

Antonio Cassese elected president of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon

According to a press release of the UN, Antonio Cassese, the former (and first) president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has been elected president of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL). Pursuant to Art. 8(2) of the Statute of the STL (annexed to UN Security Council resolution 1757) this makes judge [...]

Gabor Rona on the definition of “enemy combatant”

Jurist has an interesting article on the need of the Obama Administration to redefine the concept of “enemy combatant”. The article picks up a discussion that has been going on for the last couple of years and which has been characterized by a clash of different schools of dealing with international terrorism from the perspective [...]

EU Council removes Iranian organisation from terror list after EU Court judgment

After a battle of several year the Iranian opposition group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (“PMOI”) has succeeded in getting its name off the EU’s black list of terrorist organisations. As EUobserver reported on Tuesday, the EU Foreign Ministers agreed to remove the name of the organization from the list due to a lack of evidence [...]

Obama Signs Executive Order Closing Guantánamo

The news is just out that President Obama has signed an executive order facilitating the closure of the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A draft version of the Order is available here and news links here and here. Section 3 of the Order reads: Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities [...]

Need for a “Clean-up”

Professor Philippe Sands of UCL gives an interesting interview on NPR’s Fresh Air on the chances of officials from the Bush administration facing “international” investigations given their alleged role in the use of torture in, for instance, the Abu Graibh prison in Iraq. Sands argues that new evidence has recently emerged showing that the abuse which [...]

“Who is Responsible for the Seven Years of my Life”?

Well, if you were at Gitmo, certainly not the US. As more evidence emerges of the horrific abuses committed as part of the global “war on terror”, this seems to be the approach taken by the US government according to this article by Jane Perlez, Raymond Bonne and Salman Masood in today’s NY Times, describing [...]

Remembering 9/11

Today it is six years ago, terrorists attacked the free world by flying commercial airliners into the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Much has happened since and due to these attacks; not at least from an international law perspective: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the trial of Saddam Hussein, “Guantanamo” [...]

Fighting terrorism – European and American approach

On Wednesday, the Financial Times published an interesting article by Professor Jack L. Goldsmith on the seeming convergence between Europeans’ and Americans’ approach to fight terrorism. Another sign which might point in this very direction is the recent agreement reached between the European Union and the United States on the sharing of passenger flight data. According to [...]