International Law

Challenging the ICC’s jurisdiction based on the status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) that Afghanistan entered into with the US in 2002 is, in my opinion, the best US option if its goal is to avoid the ICC investigation. But no one has yet presented the SOFA to the ICC Prosecutor.

DPRK is either not a state party to various agreements that it might otherwise have violated or the agreements to which it is a state party do not apply in this case because it is not in an armed conflict with Malaysia. 

If nations risk breaching fundamental human rights in their pursuit of transnational criminal organizations, traffickers, and pirates, for example, due to inflexible, unnecessarily rigid, judicial interpretations and court opinions, those rulings will have increased the potential for the high seas to be a consequence free zone. The current challenge for courts, governments, and deployed naval forces is how to balance human rights obligations with the physical realities of high seas maritime enforcement interdictions.

The Trump administration will not be able to walk back the UNSC resolution on Israeli settlements, but it will have tools to mitigate its international legal effects.