A League of Their Own

In recent years China’s prominence on the world stage has grown rapidly. With consistently high GDP growth, a swelling middle class, and high-profile international events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics or the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, many recognize China as an emerging superpower. But this growth has not been consistent across all fronts, and in some respects China lags far behind other world powers. Recent events have made one area in particular stand out in this regard: oil spills.

On July 16^th in the Chinese port city of Dalian, the explosion of two oil pipelines caused thousands of barrels of oil to begin gushing into the sea. The slick has since expanded to cover hundreds of square kilometres of water and spread upwards of 90km down the coast. The spill – and China’s cack-handed response – is clearly modelled after the U.S.’s ongoing gulf coast saga – but it’s a pale imitation. Unlike the American spill, there seems to be no threat of the oil being carried to other nations’ coasts. Yet even Australia has managed to pull off a massive spill affecting its neighbours. If China wants to get into the oil spill big leagues, they’ll have to find a way to go international.

But while the international oil spill scene is characterised by intense competition, there is a notable lack of corresponding cooperation. It’s all well and good to give neighbours’ coasts…

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Anarchists Engage with G20 Issues

A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the preparation for the G20 summit next weekend in Toronto. But while the event has been a boon for the troubled artificial lake industry, not everyone will be so pleased with the assembled world leaders. From labour unions to environmentalists to indigenous rights groups, protestors are expected in the thousands. The greatest security concern however, remains the kind of anti-capitalism and anarchist groups which made the Seattle WTO summit of 1999 so memorable. The same kind will be in attendance during the Toronto summit; the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR) and FFFC Ottawa, which was responsible for the firebombing of an Ottawa bank after hours on May 18^th, have both announced they’ll be at the event.

Yet Mike Bakunin, who recently left SOAR to establish a sister branch in Rivière Ouest (Manitoba) with a more awesome acronym, claims that these groups don’t just advocate violence. “For those who think that anarchists are just about chaos and firebombing, that’s not the case. Groups like FFFC Ottawa give the rest of us a bad name – we can actually engage with the issues as well as anyone. Now obviously the summit will be focusing on economic and financial matters, so we think that we can best get our message across if we zero in on those issues as well. It’s hard to convey…

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Judicial Reform Coming to China! International Community Elated!

April 1: This morning, China’s Minister of Justice Wu Aiying held a press conference in which she declared the need for greater judicial transparency. The announcement came in the wake of a decision involving four executives of the mining corporation Rio Tinto, who were accused of bribery and stealing trade secrets. The defendants were sentenced to 7-14 years in prison, including 10 years for Australian Stern Hu.

“There are important questions about due process raised by this case,” Ms. Wu commented, “particularly since large parts of the case were heard behind closed doors.”

Ms. Wu announced that she intended to introduce a broad set of reforms to the Chinese justice system, which would greatly strengthen the principles of judicial impartiality, transparency, and fairness.

“If we are able to pass these reforms, after rigorous debate in the People’s National Congress, it will be a great step forward for the cause of justice in China.”

She also noted that tendency of Chinese courts to give exceptionally harsher sentences to those who plead not-guilty (leading to nearly universal pleas of guilty, as in the Rio Tinto case) goes against the principle that a defendant should be presumed innocent. She expressed concern that such cases as these were hurting the reputation of China’s justice system internationally.

Several high-profile international cases had indeed strained relations between China and various Western countries recently. China’s execution on December 29, 2010 of British citizen Akmal Shaikh…

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Strange Things Done in the Midnight Sun

Most systems of property law, like exorcists, attach special importance to possession. Once someone is in possession of a given piece of property, it is usually a demanding process to have them removed by force of law (pro tip: try holy water). The same has historically been true in matters of international territorial sovereignty. More often than not, the country which simply takes possession of territory will win out over others which may have more legitimate claims. Yet how can a state “take possession” of land which is uninhabitable? It doesn’t take a Neil Armstrong to tell you that the answer is by planting flags.

For some reason Canada seems unwilling to practise flag-planting as much as other countries. Today we have the excuse that most of our flags are hanging over Olympic podiums. But this wasn’t always the case, and our nervousness about throwing flags around is putting our claims of Arctic sovereignty at risk. These claims are important, and could translate into tall cash, since shrinking ice coverage and advancing technology will make it more practical to extract resources such as oil and natural gas from the Arctic seabed in the future.

Don’t let the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) fool you into thinking that flag-planting isn’t a legal basis for an Arctic claim. According to Part VI of the UNCLOS, states have an exclusive right…

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Fear and Loathing of E-Vegas

There’s no such thing as problem gambling. I should know – during the Winter Olympics alone I won over $7,000 by gambling, and that’s not even including my wagers on Olympic sports. Of course I spent $22,000, but you have to understand that winning comes in cycles, and I think I’m heading back into a hot streak now. It’s complicated – the point is people who enjoy gambling have things under control.

Why, therefore, do we need laws regulating or banning gambling? The fact that problem gambling is a myth takes care of a Hartian positivist/utilitarian justification. This leaves only Fuller and his “natural law”, which in this case amounts to antiquated Victorian morality. With such a foundation, I’d bet that today’s gambling laws are little different in substance from those of a hundred years ago.[1]

Such questions are all the more relevant today because of the rise of online gambling. Anyone who has watched movies on Megavideo knows that there are two rules: 1) there’s a 72-minute limit, and 2) popup ads for a certain gambling website – let’s call it “MartyMoker.com” – are ubiquitous. But are these kinds of betting sites legal? The truth is that in Canada today the answer is not entirely clear.

The situation is complex because online gambling by its nature involves cross-border transactions. It is clear that running an unregulated online casino from within Canadian territory…

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying About International Law and Love Toothless Inquiries

Increasingly in recent history, it has been the case that when egregious violations of international law occur resulting in thousands of deaths, the Western world will (afterwards) act to see justice done. Prominent examples include the activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and, to an extent, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. But what is the proper response when it is Westerners who egregiously violate international law, resulting in thousands of deaths? If you answered “something similar”, then you are wrong. Shame on you.

No, an example of the proper response can be seen in Britain today, where an inquiry into the decisions leading up to the Iraq war, headed by Sir John Chilcot, has been underway since July. As the inquiry’s website makes clear, this is not a criminal tribunal, and it is not placing anyone on trial. Rather its purpose is to accurately establish what happened, and to identify lessons that can be learned (though have no fear: if the inquiry finds that mistakes were made, “it will say so”).

Britain’s Iraq inquiry is a nice, typical piece of theatre, with a colourful cast of characters. Those gaining the most attention include Jack Straw, Foreign Minister in 2003; Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General; Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office’s most senior legal advisor; Wood’s deputy Elizabeth Wilmshurst; as well as good…

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Should Canada Gyp the Roma?

Surprisingly for such a boring country, Canada has on occasion been described as “cool”.[1] But if we want to stick with the cool international crowd, we have to keep up with the latest trends. Most Canadians probably think that discrimination against minorities went out of fashion years ago, but lately one old classic has come back in vogue: persecuting the Roma (also known as Romani, or Gypsies).

Many Canadians may find picking on members of a small diaspora community unappealing. But like other trends such as Ugg boots or skinny jeans, just because we find them distasteful doesn’t mean we can ignore them. And there’s no denying that discrimination against the Roma is back in style – just look at Europe.

According to Amnesty International, and despite a 2007 ruling against the practice by the European Court of Human Rights, Roma children in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are still routinely placed outside mainstream schools in “special schools,” ordinarily reserved for children with mental disabilities. In Serbia and Romania, groups of Roma have been evicted from their “unlawful settlements” (which, in Serbia, were then bulldozed), and forced into even more makeshift accommodations. To be fair though, as one Romanian Vice-Mayor noted, this was really positive discrimination since the evicted Roma were provided with free metal barracks to live in – the lucky devils! In Hungary, incidents of violence against the Roma have been…

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Drugs Are Winning the War on Drugs

It’s been forty years since US President Richard Milhous Nixon first declared war on drugs, famously stating: “You’re either with us, or you’re with the drugs.” Yet today, the world is facing defeat at the hands of drugs – mankind’s greatest, and most seductive, adversary.

The United States has led the world in the long campaign against drugs. A major offensive began in 1988 with the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which 184 countries have ratified. This convention requires its members to criminalise drug trafficking and possession, and remains in force today. The move, coupled with “Say no to drugs!” and “I learned it by watching you!” public awareness campaigns, must have been successful, as it prompted drugs to strike back. In the 1990s, drugs targeted and killed prominent celebrities, including Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and Chris Farley. Refusing to be deterred by these terrorist tactics, the world soldiered on in the war.

In 1998, the UN General Assembly Special Session on Illicit Drugs was held. The session concluded with the adoption of a political declaration, which included commitments to achieving “significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction,” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy” by the year 2008. That these goals have not been met is…

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Somalian Pirates We!

In the battle against the ever-increasing threat of piracy off the coast of Somalia, a court has finally entered the fray. The court in question is Dutch, and in a recent decision stepped in to prevent a 14-year old girl from sailing off on her own to join the Somali pirates. Typically, the girl claimed she only wanted to break the record for the youngest solo circumnavigation of the world by sail. The truth however is painfully obvious: under the influence of torrent websites and Johnny Depp, youngsters from around the world are unable to resist the romance of piracy, and are setting sail to Somalia to sign up.

Striking a blow against Somali piracy, the momentous Dutch decision responded to a simple question: with no credible Somali government, who else was going to do it? And why shouldn’t a country enforce laws for someone else – look at Belgium’s fancy “universal jurisdiction” law. These questions go to a problem at the heart of public international law today: the “law is power” conundrum. In private international law, states in recent history have been moving further and further from a power-based model towards one founded on international comity. Globalisation rhetoric would have us believe that public international law is doing the same, but the Somali piracy issue belies this notion.

Somalia today, along with a handful of other places such as Pakistan’s tribal regions and…

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