Suchergebnisse

Secretary of State John Kerry spent the spring shuttling between his two major foreign-policy concerns -- Russia's control over Crimea and Israel's control over the West Bank -- entirely unaware that he was engaged in a world-historical irony. Both these situations turn on identical international-law principles. Indeed, the failure of the US to apply these principles consistently has led to the long-standing failure of its Middle East initiatives, while inadvertently opening the door for Russian aggression. The legal principle that explains why Crimea was and remains under Ukraine's sovereignty also validates Israel's presence in the West Bank. But, as many foreign-policy realists argued while Vladimir Putin was making his move, it is not all that clear why Crimea should belong to Ukraine in the first place. The substantial majority of the population is ethnically, linguistically, and religiously Russian. Thus, all Ukraine has for its claim of title to Crimea is a dead dictator's whim. But for international law, that is more than enough. Adapted from the source document.

In the first criminal piracy decision by a United States court in nearly a century, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the federal piracy statute's reference to the "law of nations" explicitly ties the scope of the offense to evolving customary international law definitions of the crime. The court went on to find that under current customary and treaty law, attempted piracy falls within the scope of the international crime. In doing so, it joined several courts in nations around the world that have confronted the issue as a result of the outbreak of Somali piracy that began in 2008.