On 23 May, the Qatar News Agency published content attributing statements to Qatar’s Emir which laid bare simmering regional sensitivities and quickly escalated into a full-blown diplomatic row between Qatar and other regional Powers. Indeed, on Monday 5 June, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt adopted what has been dubbed a ‘diplomatic and economic blockade’ (to the annoyance of some). Not only did these States close their land, naval and aerial borders for travel and transport to and from Qatar, the three Gulf States also appeared to expel Qatari diplomats and order (some) Qatari citizens to leave their territory within 14 days. In addition, websites from the Al Jazeera Media Network, as well as other Qatari newspapers, were blocked and offices were shut down in several countries. At the end of a feverish week, on Friday 9 June, targeted sanctions were furthermore adopted against Qatari organizations and nationals believed to have links to Islamist militancy. In justification of the…
Sanctions
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Non-UN Financial Sanctions against Central Banks and Heads of State: in breach of international immunity law?
Conventional Wisdom Challenged? Recent years have seen a wide range of non-UN financial sanctions being adopted against States and their instrumentalities, including central banks, as well as against high-level State officials. Prominent examples include the EU and US sanctions against the central banks of Syria and Iran, and the asset freezes against the serving Presidents of…
Excusing Humanitarian Intervention – A Reply to Jure Vidmar
The US strikes in Syria, for which the US offered no legal justification, have once again ignited the debate on the qualification of such acts as illegal but legitimate – a label that had been used, in its day, to describe NATO’s use of force in Kosovo. Legally speaking, what does this sentence mean? Jure Vidmar, in…
United States’ Missile Strikes in Syria: Should International Law Permit Unilateral Force to Protect Human Rights?
A bounty of recent blog posts have poured over the legality of the Trump administration’s missile strikes against a Syrian airbase in response to President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons (see, e.g, here, here, here, here and here). Possible justifications have recently come to light, but do not provide a sufficient…
Echoes of Kadi: Reforms to Internal Remedies at INTERPOL
In November 2016, the international police body INTERPOL adopted major reforms to its internal complaints mechanism, the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) (see the new Statute of the CCF, entering into force in March 2017 (CCF Statute)). The reforms respond to campaigning by the NGO Fair Trials (see its response), and are welcome…
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