International Law Archive

Last month, Germany voiced concerns over the inclusion of an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in the free trade agreement between the European Union and Canada. German objections also call into question the inclusion of an ISDS in the trade deal currently being negotiated between the EU and the United States. In an email interview, Timothy Josling, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, discussed the settlements and their role in international trade agreements. WPR: What is an Investor-State Dispute Settlement and how common is it in free trade agreements? Timothy Josling: Investor-State Dispute Settlement […]

This year, while Europe commemorated 100 years since the beginning of World War I, a long-forgotten conflict on the edge of the continent rumbled on. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a contest for control over Nagorno-Karabakh for more than 25 years. Beginning as an obscure conflict in a remote Soviet province during perestroika, the Nagorno-Karabakh stand-off has evolved into an enduring rivalry between two independent states, profoundly affecting both and casting a consistent shadow of insecurity across the South Caucasus. The conflict began in 1988, when a movement formed by the local Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, then an […]

Last week, a former Syrian military photographer, his identity hidden under a blue hoodie, appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee with thousands of photographs allegedly showing widespread torture and killing in Bashar al-Assad’s jails. Known as “Caesar,” the photographer defected last year with a trove of what he says is evidence of mass atrocities in Syria’s uprising-turned-civil-war: 55,000 photographs of more than 11,000 victims—many of them tagged and numbered. The photographs first came to light last January, in a report by three prominent international lawyers who previously prosecuted cases at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra […]

Last week, the State Department officially reported that Russia had violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty when it tested cruise missiles starting in 2008. Republican lawmakers expressed immediate dismay, building on a steady drumbeat of criticism about the Obama administration’s response to Russian actions in recent months. The report found Russia “in violation of its obligations” under the treaty to not test a ground-launched cruise missile with a maximum range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. A State Department spokesperson writes in an email to Trend Lines that “this is a serious matter which we have attempted to […]