My entire professional life has been in the law, but nothing had prepared me for this. I have been a tenured faculty member  at the finest institutions, most recently Harvard and NYU.  I have held visiting appointments from Florence to Singapore, from Melbourne to Jerusalem. I have acted as legal counsel to governments on four continents, handled cases before the highest jurisdictions and arbitrated the most complex disputes among economic ‘super powers.’

Last week, for the first  time I found myself  in the dock, as a criminal defendant. The French Republic v Weiler on a charge of Criminal Defamation. The setting could not have been grander.  As I entered the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, the French Old Bailey, my lawyer whispered: ‘Emile Zola was tried here.’ Vive la difference: This was no Dreyfus Affair but the stakes for Academic Freedom and liberty of expression are huge.

As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may see all details here.  The author of the book, claiming defamation, demanded I remove it. I examined carefully the claim and concluded that the accusation was fanciful. Unflattering? Yes. Defamatory, by no stretch of imagination. It was my ‘Voltairian’ moment. I refused the request. I did offer to publish a reply by the author. This offer was declined.

Three months later I was summoned to appear before an Examining Magistrate in Paris based on a complaint of criminal defamation lodged by the author. Why Paris you might ask? Indeed. The author of the book was an Israeli academic. The book was in English. The publisher was Dutch. The reviewer was a distinguished German professor. The review was published on a New York website.

Beyond doubt, once a text or image go online, they become available worldwide, including France. But should that alone give jurisdiction to French courts in circumstances such as this? Does the fact that the author of the book, it turned out, retained her French nationality before going to live and work in Israel make a difference? Libel tourism – libel terrorism to some — is typically associated with London, where notorious high legal fees and punitive damages coerce many to throw in the towel even before going to trial. Paris, as we would expect, is more egalitarian and less materialist. It is very plaintiff friendly. (more…)

Today an Israeli inquiry, the Turkel Committee, published the first part of its report on the Mavi Marmara incident and the lawfulness of the Gaza blockade generally, finding that Israel acted in accordance with international law (full report; summary; BBC News article). An earlier UN inquiry reached the opposite conclusion – for a critique see Yuval Shany’s post; for previous coverage see this post by Dapo.  I have not had the time to read the report, let alone digest it, but on a quick skim I saw, inter alia, that the report qualified the Israel/Hamas conflict as an international armed conflict, thus enabling the creation of a blockade, without however articulating a clear theory in that regard. The report also somewhat more controversially alleges that a blockade would be permissible even if the conflict was non-international in nature (see paras. 37-44).

Our friends at Oxford University Press have let us know that their yearbooks  are now available online, which will make them much more accessible and easier to use. The OUP notice is reproduced below, coupled with an offer of free access to all of the content for a limited time.

Law Yearbooks from Oxford – Free Online Access until February 28^th

Since the start of January 2011 the law yearbooks from Oxford University Press, previously available only in print, have become available online as well. This includes all volumes since 1996 but not the most recent ones which only published in December 2010.

To launch this initiative we are making all of this content freely available until the end of February 2011. To view, browse, download and search the material click on these links:

British Year Book of International Law

Yearbook of International Environmental Law

Yearbook of European Law

Current Legal Problems

The latest volume of each will become available to subscribers from April 2011. New content for future volumes will become available online to subscribers as it is processed thus dramatically reducing the time taken before an author’s work is publicly available.

For access after the end of February you will need a subscription. Please contact your librarian if you are not sure whether your institution has taken up a subscription.

Antonios Tzanakopoulos is Lecturer in Public International Law at the University of Glasgow.

On 12 January 2011, the Greek Government announced its decision to apply to the International Court of Justice for permission to intervene in the sovereign immunity dispute brought by Germany against Italy (see here for Dapo’s comment when the case was first brought). The Greek decision to intervene has received some coverage in the Greek and German media, but has gone relatively unnoticed in the English-speaking world. Even though the Government had been under some pressure, both by opposition parties and by public opinion (see eg here [in Greek]), to intervene in the dispute, its decision does come as a relative surprise. Greece is already engaged in one case before the ICJ, where fYR Macedonia has complained of the alleged breach of the 1995 Interim Accord between the two States with reference to Greece’s conduct in response to fYR Macedonia’s bid to join NATO (see here for brief comment), and is also in dire economic straits. Still, the Greek Government elected to open a new front, primarily, it seems, for ‘symbolic’ reasons (see the Greek PM’s statement reported here [in Greek]). Needless to say, Germany was less than impressed by the Greek decision (see the comments by Foreign Minister Westerwelle here; the standard AP report as relayed by the Jerusalem Post here; and the German press here and here [in German]; but see also here for a German position in favour of Athens’s intervention, which however confuses individual criminal responsibility with state responsibility [in German]).

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I am sad to report that Professor Brian Simpson has passed away yesterday, 10 January 2011, at his home in Sandwich, Kent. He was possessed of a truly unique erudition, coupled with a superb wit and sense of humour; his scholarship never failed to impress. It is in particular his work as a legal historian which was without peer, making an impact even on courts dealing with oh-so-modern issues like detention in the ‘war on terror’; his magisterial In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (Clarendon Press, 1992) was cited both by the House of Lords and the US Supreme Court. And even on this sad occasion the first two pages of his Human Rights and the End of Empire (OUP, 2004) cannot but make me laugh out loud. Brian and his laughter will be sorely missed; our condolences go to his family.

A couple of days ago EJIL: Talk! celebrated its second birthday. With more than three hundred posts and an ever increasing readership, we hope that the blog continues to grow in the new year. We also wish to express our thanks to our contributors and commentators, and to extend our warmest wishes to all of our readers for the upcoming holidays.

As a fitting follow-up to Frederic and Alexandra’s fabulous fable on the rise and fall of Eunomia, readers might be interested in Roger O’Keefe extraordinary performance at ESIL in Cambridge this September. To much hilarity among the audience, Roger spun a tale about gaps in the law that featured a stellar cast, including a bespectacled and boyish Finnish professor, a mercurial French ILC rapporteur, and EJIL’s own Joseph Weiler, who reminded everyone, as the ‘Talmud long ago taught us’, ‘that even contradictory conclusions can both be the living word of God’.

Roger’s speech – which is not only extremely funny but has something truly useful to say – is now available on the Cambridge conference website (h/t to the new blawg written by Nottingham PhD students). As good as the speech itself was, it was Roger’s delivery that made it truly great. Easily one of the most entertaining (not to mention non-soporific) academic performances that I’ve ever seen; regrettably, no Youtube clip survives. Too bad if you weren’t there, but please do read the speech itself!

Today the ICJ delivered its merits judgment in the case concerning Ahmadou Sadio Diallo (Republic of Guinea v. Democratic Republic of the Congo). The Court found that in carrying out the arrest, detention and expulsion of Mr. Diallo in 1995-1996, the DRC violated his fundamental rights under applicable human rights treaties, but that it did not violate his direct rights as “associé” in the companies Africom-Zaire and Africontainers-Zaire. The judgment is available here, the Court’s press release here.

The ICJ has announced today that Congo has withdrawn its application against France in the case concerning Certain Criminal Proceedings in France (Republic of the Congo v. France). (ICJ Press Release). The case dealt with the lawfulness of criminal proceedings in France taken under the principle universal jurisdiction. A notable feature of the case was also that the ICJ’s jurisdiction was based on forum prorogatum, i.e. France’s consent that the specific case be brought against it.

I am myself not at all familiar with the history of the litigation, but I find it quite odd for an application to be discontinued at such a late stage in the proceedings. The case has been pending since 2002, and it has gone through no less than three (3!) rounds of written pleadings. Oral proceedings were due to start on 6 December this year, i.e. a month before the request for discontinuance was filed with the Court. I really wonder what precipitated such a turn of events. Comments by readers with some insights into the matter would be most welcome.

Antonios Tzanakopoulos is Lecturer in Public International Law at the University of Glasgow. Many thanks are due to Christian Tams, Marko Milanović, and Dapo Akande for their comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

In the aftermath of the ECJ’s Kadi decision, which annulled the EC Regulation implementing the 1267 sanctions regime against Mr Kadi and the Al Barakaat Foundation, Kadi was almost immediately relisted by the Council of the EU in a new Regulation. This subjected him afresh to the restrictive regime of SCRs 1267 (1999) et seq, most recently SCR 1904 (2009). And, as Devika Hovell reported on this blog, almost immediately Kadi brought a fresh challenge against that Regulation before the CFI, now renamed as the ‘General Court of the EU’ after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. On 30 September, the General Court rendered its decision in Kadi II.

EJIL:Talk! regular readers will know that we have consistently reported on challenges to the 1267 regime before national and regional courts on this blog (see eg here, here, here, here, here, and here). In Kadi II, the General Court grudgingly follows the ECJ’s reasoning in Kadi I and confirms a trend of defiance of Security Council sanctions. In this post I will try to situate the Kadi II decision in the context of challenges to Security Council restrictive measures under Article 41 of the UN Charter. (more…)