Posts filed under 'Foreign Affairs and Diplomacy'
February 8th, 2010 at 08:48am
After numerous false starts, negotiations between the two parties to the decades-old stalemate in Cyprus seem to be moving forward again, this time with the assistance of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban Ki-moon recently made his first official visit to Cyprus. The island nation has been divided into a Greek-speaking south and a Turkish-speaking north since 1974, when a Greek-led coup sought to annex the island to Greece, prompting a Turkish invasion that claimed the top 37% of the island. The north, which calls itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), has only been recognized by Turkey, and has lagged behind the impressive economic development of the south, which enjoys broad international recognition and now represents the island in the European Union. UN peacekeepers patrol the unofficial border between the two sides, and the island is heavily militarized. During his visit, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon visited with leaders from both the Turkish and Greek factions.
Previous talks have been derailed by a number of contentious issues; the most serious recent attempt at unification, in 2004, produced an agreement which was subsequently ratified in a referendum by the north but rejected, under the hard-line presidency of Tassos Papadopoulos, by the south. Papadopoulos has since been replaced by the more moderate Demetris Christofias, but the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat, now faces a challenge in upcoming elections from a more hard-line candidate. This has ramped up the pressure for a solution, as has the fact that the ongoing stalemate has dimmed Turkey’s prospects in its own bid for EU accession.
Legal issues relating to the conflict stem originally from the question of whether the 1974 Turkish invasion was justified as a matter of international law. Greek Cypriots argue that the invasion was a clear violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits aggressive war; their argument is supported by the fact that no multilateral body authorized the action. Turkish Cypriots counter that Turkey’s response was justified, as a form of self-defense, by the prospect of the island’s annexation to Greece, and, as a form of humanitarian intervention, by longstanding intercommunal violence directed toward the Turkish-speaking minority. Going forward, both political and legal solutions will be needed to address issues including the division of contested territory, the presence of Turkish forces, reparations for lost property, and power sharing under a proposed federation.
For more information, please click here.
Permalink
January 31st, 2010 at 04:16pm
On January 1st 2010, a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) took effect. The newly formed FTA is the third largest in the world, with a GDP of $6.6 trillion and a population of 1.9 billion. Prior to the agreement in 2008, China was ASEAN’s third-largest trading partner.
Despite the concerns of members like Indonesia over the impact that the agreement will have on domestic industry, ASEAN is confident that China will act cooperatively in order to ensure mutual gains. The State Councilor of the People’s Republic of China, H.E. Dai Bingguo, recently met with the ASEAN Secretariat to discuss China’s commitment to aid in the transition process, confirming China’s position in a speech before more than 300 dignitaries. This was the first time that a high-level Chinese Diplomat visited the ASEAN Secretariat.
Further, as the Secretary General of ASEAN notes, there are mechanisms such as anti-dumping safeguards in the FTA to protect the domestic markets of ASEAN member states.
For further information, please click here.
Permalink
November 15th, 2009 at 11:00pm
On Tuesday, November 10, the navies of North and South Korea exchanged fire in disputed waters off the western coast of the peninsula, damaging ships from both sides and reportedly killing a North Korean sailor. The incident began when a 215-ton North Korean vessel entered South Korean-controlled waters. Ignoring warnings from the South, the ship exchanged fire with two 130-ton South Korean vessels before re-crossing the border, reportedly in flames. The North, which claims the waters where the incident took place, has blamed the South for instigating the confrontation and issued repeated warnings through its state news service.
South Korea’s options in responding to this incident are limited. Seoul’s right to military retaliation is constrained by the ongoing border dispute. The end of the Korean War never produced a peace treaty, and the North and South have technically been observing a truce since 1953. The North has never accepted the current sea boundary, a UN-drawn border called the northern limit line, and its ships regularly stray into waters controlled by the South. In this context, the South cannot make an undisputed claim that its territory was invaded.
South Korea’s options for less direct action are similarly constrained. While the South could initiate economic sanctions and asset-freezing, it believes that such measures could add to the desperate poverty of the North’s citizens and slow the recent détente between the two countries. In a sign that the confrontation has not altered trade relationships, a North Korean freighter was allowed to enter South Korean waters yesterday on its way to Incheon. Meanwhile, any attempt to arbitrate the dispute before an international body would require the consent of one of the most isolationist regimes in the world.
The North has a history of initiating skirmishes in order to escalate pressure before major regional events; the last time the countries clashed was in 2002, while the South was hosting the World Cup. In this case, analysts believe, the North may be trying to send a message to President Obama, who is currently visiting the region and is scheduled to arrive in Seoul on Wednesday. North Korea wants a formal peace treaty to replace the 1953 truce, including reconsideration of disputed territory. It also wants bilateral negotiations with the U.S., which it believes could lead to its acceptance as a nuclear power. President Obama, who has made engagement with “rogue states” a cornerstone of his foreign policy, plans to send special envoy Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang for talks over ending the North’s nuclear program.
Permalink
November 6th, 2009 at 07:45pm
The interim government of Honduras has filed a complaint against Brazil in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Court announced on October 29. The complaint arises from events surrounding the surprise return to Honduras of Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, who entered the country on September 21 and took refuge in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa. Specifically, Honduras charges that Mr. Zelaya and an unknown number of other Honduran citizens have been using the Embassy as a “platform for political propaganda” with the complicity of Embassy staff and thereby “threatening the peace and internal public order of Honduras.” Honduras has requested declaratory and injunctive relief from the ICJ.
The legal bases of Honduras’s complaint are Article 2 (7) of the UN Charter, which reserves to member states matters which are “essentially within [their] domestic jurisdiction,” and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. As a practical matter, Honduras’s complaint is only one element of a broader political and diplomatic offensive aimed at preventing Mr. Zelaya from returning to power before the upcoming presidential elections scheduled for November 29. It is unclear whether the ICJ will agree to hear the complaint, which was filed by an interim administration that many international observers consider illegitimate. Current efforts toward national reconciliation may also determine whether the case goes forward.
For more information, please click here.
Permalink
November 1st, 2009 at 10:17pm
The legality of the U.S. Government’s use of unmanned Predator drones to target militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan has recently come under increasing scrutiny, as a prominent U.N. representative called the American refusal to discuss the program “untenable”. Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, made his remarks while reiterating requests for the U.S. to provide information on the legal rationale for its use of the drones, the mechanisms it uses to review the program, and the precautions it takes to make sure its air strikes conform with international law.
The debate over the legality of remote-controlled air strikes turns largely on the question of whether the American pursuit of terrorists represents an active armed conflict analogous to a conventional war between nations. As such, the debate over the drones is one example of the broader disagreement which has resulted from the application of international humanitarian law (IHL) to the “war on terror.” IHL, which regulates armed conflict between states, requires the existence of an active conflict, and only applies within the geographic limits of that conflict. Within these limits, IHL authorizes the killing of enemy combatants, including remotely, subject to limitations meant to assure that the use of force is necessary, minimally injurious to civilians, and proportional to expected military gains. Outside a zone of active conflict, however, IHL does not apply, and the U.S. ability to kill individuals without according them due process of law is restrained by a 1976 executive order against assassinations and, arguably, by international human rights law.
While some observers would call Afghanistan a zone of active conflict, far fewer would apply that description to Pakistan, and drones operated by the C.I.A. have been active in targeting militants there, including Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in August. American drones have also targeted militants in Yemen. In extending IHL to cover these strikes, supporters of the program have argued for the application of IHL wherever terrorists are found, not merely within geographically bounded zones of conflict. This is a novel argument, and as such, the use of Predators to target individuals outside the “war zones” of Afghanistan and Iraq arguably represents a violation of international law. It also represents a sharp departure from pre-9/11 U.S. policy, when C.I.A. drones were limited to conducting surveillance and the U.S. Government criticized Israel for conducting targeted killings of Palestinian militants.
Supporters of the C.I.A. program have argued that, whether or not IHL applies to the air strikes, they are lawful under both the UN Charter and the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) as a form of “anticipatory self-defense.” But opponents point to the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention in the affairs of other states, arguing that individuals outside active war zones should be brought to justice through domestic processes of law. The question of whether the air strikes are proportional under IHL is also debated; the New Yorker reports that the effort to kill Baitullah Mehsud involved a series of 15 air strikes killing more than 200 other people. Finally, the loosening of geographic restrictions on state-sanctioned lethal force raises the uncomfortable prospect of an amorphous, global definition of conflict, which other states or non-state actors could potentially use to target Americans.
The practical value of the C.I.A. program is also debated. While the use of Predators has been credited with eliminating numerous Al Qaeda leaders and sowing confusion within the organization, it has also led to many civilian casualties, which has rallied anti-American sentiment in the very places where the U.S. is trying hardest to win “hearts and minds.” Another criticism of the program is that electing to kill terrorists rather than capture and interrogate them reduces the intelligence the U.S. can gather on its enemies; proponents of this argument point to the potential information value of Saad bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons, who was killed by a Predator strike in Pakistan. Finally, the recent inclusion of prominent Afghan drug traffickers on the list of acceptable targets has led critics to wonder whether there is any coherent policy limiting the use of the drones to individuals who pose a direct threat to the United States.
Whatever the legal and practical arguments for or against the use of unmanned air strikes against non-state actors, they are unlikely to end in the near future. In the rugged, inaccessible areas where many militants operate, the U.S. Government often believes that it has no good alternatives to the drones. Facing resistance to its plans to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the Obama administration may make remote-controlled warfare an ever more central part of its counterterrorism strategy.
For further information, please click here and here.
Permalink
November 1st, 2009 at 10:07pm
On Thursday (10/29), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) released its ruling on three cases concerning disappearances in Chechnya. In one of the cases, the victim, Mayrudin Khantiyev, had been abducted from his home by a group of masked men. In the other two cases, the victims, Yusup Satabayev and Kazbek Vakhayev, disappeared while in Russian detention. In all three cases, the Court rejected Russia’s arguments that the men had not been under Russian control at their time of disappearance and awarded the victims’ families a combined total of 130,540 euros for Russia’s violations of the victims’ rights under the European Covenant on Human Rights.
These cases fall in a steady stream of petitions to the Court concerning events in Chechnya—by some estimates up to 400. The Court has now issued judgments in 120 of these cases and has developed evidentiary presumptions for the Chechen context, which it applied to the cases at hand.
For example, the Court has before held that it will draw a negative inference from Russia’s refusal to turn over investigative reports—despite the fact that Russia’s domestic law bans the government from doing so. The Court relied on such an inference to reject Russia’s claims that Satabayev and Vakhayev had been released from Russian detention before they disappeared. Furthermore, the Court made reference to factual presumptions arising from Russia’s “exclusive control” of the area from which Khantiyev was abducted—as well as Russian guards’ “blatant passivity” in response to the event—in rejecting Russia’s contention that Khantiyev’s abductors had not been Russian agents.
In analyzing claims relating to the victims’ right to life, the Court referred to a much stronger evidentiary presumption that it first developed in the 2006 case of Imakayeva v. Russia: “[I]n the context of the conflict in the Chechen Republic, when a person is placed in detention without any subsequent acknowledgement of the detention, this can be regarded as life-threatening.” In other words, the Court will presume someone dead when it is established that they disappeared under Russian control.
Ole Solvang, Executive Director of the Russian Justice Initiative, suggests that such victim-friendly evidentiary presumptions have developed in the Chechen disappearance context due to the fact that “[t]he frequent lack of evidence concerning the fate of the victim and the identity of the perpetrators makes it difficult for a court to hold individuals responsible for the disappearance of a person.” The problem is also widespread, with a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report from 2005 already estimating that some 5,000 people had disappeared in Chechnya at the hands of military and security forces since the outbreak of hostilities in 1999—occurrences that in the aggregate HRW calls a crime against humanity.
HRW’s allegations, based not on human rights law but rather on the laws of armed conflict or international humanitarian law (IHL), remind us that the line of Chechen cases before the ECtHR are part of a larger trend of victims of wartime atrocities turning to human rights tribunals to air their claims in the absence of effective enforcement for the laws of war. Last summer’s armed conflict in South Ossetia, for example, has given rise to a flurry of additional cases before the ECtHR as well as a claim by Georgia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Russia’s actions violated the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—a case that the ICJ accepted on the bases of the Convention even though it would not have been able to hear it without Russia’s consent had it been brought under IHL.
There are different views on the merits of translating wartime activities into claims under human rights instruments designed for peacetime, but one result of the trend is clear from the ECtHR’s treatment of the Chechnya cases. While IHL generally applies different law to different individuals based on their status as a civilian or member of an armed group, human rights courts seem generally willing to substitute their functional tests that look beyond membership to the individual characteristics of the victim. In the present three cases, for example, the Court made no distinction between Satabeyev, who had been a member of a rebel group, and the other two victims, who had not.
In other cases, the Court has further proved willing to enforce the protections provided by human rights law even when IHL would explicitly have offered lesser protection. For example, in the 1996 case of Bazorkina v. Russia, the Court found that a rebel detained while in active combat enjoyed the extensive procedural rights afforded by the Convention—as opposed to the low level of protection provided to combatants in non-international armed conflicts by Article 3 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
Notwithstanding their legal victories, family members of victims in Chechnya still bemoan Russia’s continued unwillingness to help them locate the bodies of their loved ones, according to a HRW report published last month. Nevertheless, with some 300 cases still pending before the ECtHR on the Chechen conflict alone, as well as new cases from the South Ossetian conflict now on the dockets of the ECtHR and ICJ, it is unlikely we will soon see the end of war victims turning to human rights law for reparation.
For further information, please click here.
Permalink
April 15th, 2009 at 09:57am
On Wednesdsay, current Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora’s government agreed to hand over relevant case files to the U.N.’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The tribunal convened last month to investigate the 2005 murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. The tribunal may now request the transfer of the suspects–four Lebanese generals–to U.N. custody. Initial reports released by the U.N. point to the possible involvement of the Syrian intelligence service in the assassination, but Syria has repeatedly denied this. Leaders of Hezbollah, the opposition party and militia which is supported by the Syrian government, have expressed their reservations in complying with the tribunal’s request. Their lack of cooperation could halt U.N. efforts, because Hezbollah may control the government after June’s elections. The Hague is pressing the case despite the potential roadblock caused by the uncertain political climate. The tribunal is the first U.N. court to try suspects for specific terrorist acts. The murder of Hariri and 22 others in 2005 resulted in street protests which led to the end of Syria’s military occupation of Lebanon.
For further information, please click here.
Permalink
April 9th, 2009 at 12:15pm
The international community roundly condemned North Korea following the test launch of a missile capable of striking targets throughout East Asia as well as in Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands. President Obama and other international leaders issued strong rebukes following news of the launch.
President Obama, speaking in Prague, called the launch a “provocative action” and urged the North Koreans to avoid further such actions and abide by their international obligations. A joint U.S.-European Union statement called for a response from the broader international community. Both calls highlighted U.N. Security Council Resolutions prohibiting North Korea from nuclear or missile tests and suggested that the Security Council respond.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the launch as well but did not mention action by the Security Council or whether it would pursue the matter further. The Security Council was scheduled to meet in emergency session following the launch to consider a response.
President Obama used the opportunity to highlight his Administration’s broader efforts to stabilize the Korean Peninsula and to advance the cause of nuclear nonproliferation.
For further information, please click here.
Permalink
April 9th, 2009 at 12:13pm
After spending time in London, Strasbourg, Baden-Baden, and Prague for G20, NATO, and bilateral US-EU summits, President Obama extended his recent European tour by traveling to Ankara and Istanbul, his first venture into the predominantly Muslim world as US president.
Once again reflecting an interest in revitalizing America’s diplomatic ties, Mr. Obama visited the grave of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and met with both Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkey visit followed the President’s comments in Prague supporting the entry of Turkey into the European Union.
“The United States and Europe must approach Muslims as our friends, neighbors and partners in fighting injustice, intolerance and violence, forging a relationship based on mutual respect and mutual interest,” he said. “Moving forward towards Turkish membership in the EU would be an important signal of your commitment to this agenda and ensure that we continue to anchor Turkey firmly in Europe.”
Obama’s comments elicited tepid responses from his French and German hosts. For more information please see here and here.
Permalink
April 6th, 2009 at 09:00am
In January, a Spanish judge agreed to pursue a complaint against military officials in Israel, including former defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. The complaint arose from a 2002 air attack on Gaza City that killed 15 Palestinians, mainly children, and wounded 150. The public prosecutors have now asked that judge to shelve that complaint; the judge must issue a ruling on whether or not he will honor that request.
Spain claims universal jurisdiction over genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity, no matter where the crime occurs. However, this jurisdiction only applies if the crime is not the subject of a legal proceeding in the country in which it occurred. Spanish public prosecutors justified the decision to drop the case based on information that Israel had initiated its own proceedings. However, the case could be reopened if contradicting evidence about Israeli action emerges.
Israeli’s leaders criticized Spain’s decision to prosecute as politically motivated from the beginning. The decision to charge came after the most recent Israeli offensive in Gaza early this year that killed 1,300 Palestinians. Spain has recognized the political fallout of the legal action and Spanish officials have announced an intention to alter the “universal justice” rule to avoid similar political controversy in the future.
For more information, please click here
Permalink
Previous Posts
