Latest in Biological and Chemical Weapons
Curt Bradley’s thoughts are at AJIL Unbound, the Volokh Conspiracy has commentary by Nick Rosenkranz and Ilya Somin, and Jean Galbraith and http://opiniojuri
In an excellent Lawfare post last month, Does the U.N.’s Syria Resolution Violate the Chemical Weapons Convention? Faiza Patel asserts that if Syria sent chemical weapons to another country, Syria would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The conclusion stems from her reasonable, though (to my eye) exceedingly literal reading of the CWC—which bans the “transfer” of chemical weapons to “anyone.”
The UN Security Council (UNSC)
The NYT has the text of the draft UN Security Council Resolution on Syria. The most important paragraph is the penultimate one, which states that the Security Council “[d]ecides, in the event of non-compliance with this resolution, including unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic, to impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.” I think this means that non-compliance will re
Over at Foreign Policy, Shane Harris has a story about Nathan Myhrvold's Lawfare Research Paper Series paper: "Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action." Along the way, it also contains some nice words about Lawfare.
Julian Ku is right to poke fun at the administration for conveying its vague and conclusory legal rationale for intervening in Syria through the reporting of the NYT’s Charlie Savage. But vague and conclusory guidance via the NYT is better than no guidance at all.
On the international law rationale for interventio
Senators Manchin and Heitcamp are working on an alternative Syria Resolution that tentatively provides:
The failure by the government of Bashar al-Assad to sign and comply with the [Chemical Weapons] Convention clearly demonstrates a disregard of international norms on the use of chemical weapons.
John Dehn, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a Senior Fellow in West Point's Center for the Rule of Law, writes in with this comment about Syria and humanitarian intervention:
Much of the discussion surrounding potential U.S.
Earlier today I said that President Obama’s dismissal of a Security Council authorization as a prerequisite for intervention in Syria “marks the death knell for the long-held USG view that humanitarian intervention without Security Council approval violates the U.N.
As Congress moves to debate authorization for the use of force in Syria, and especially since there is some question about whether DOD has adequate funding for a strike in Syria, Congress may want to ponder the votes it took in the not-unrelated context of Kosovo fourteen years ago. (The original purposes of the Kosovo strikes were similar to the ones stated for Syria: “to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's
A few items that are in my opinion worth a read:
Opinio Juris is having an insta-symposium on Syria. I recommend in particular Marty Lederman’s two posts on the relevance of the U.N.