International Law Archive

Can the Trump administration give the General Assembly of the United Nations a new sense of purpose? This may sound like an uproariously silly question. The assembly, in which all U.N. member states are theoretically equals, is largely a geopolitical backwater. It churns out hundreds of resolutions each year, and the vast majority of these are unimportant. Few people are probably aware that the assembly passed a lengthy resolution on the political status of Bermuda last year, for example, and even fewer are likely to be excited that it did so. Yet the assembly can cause the occasional kerfuffle. Last […]

On June 2, authorities in the U.K. charged Agnes Reeves Taylor, the ex-wife of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, with torture in connection with crimes she allegedly committed during the West African nation’s prolonged period of civil conflict. The arrest makes Reeves Taylor the latest in a series of high-profile Liberians to be arrested in Europe and the United States in recent years. In Liberia, meanwhile, there has been no progress on justice initiatives under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Charles Taylor is serving a 50-year sentence in the U.K. for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but his trial dealt […]

U.S. President Donald Trump’s battle with the multilateral system just got real. For the first four months of his presidency, Trump fought a phony war with the United Nations and other international institutions. On the campaign trail and in the wake of his election victory, he had condemned the U.N. as lazy, impotent and anti-American. From its first week in office, his administration threatened major financial cuts to international institutions and aid projects. But there was more bark than bite. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., calmed foreign diplomats’ fears by taking a rational and collegial approach to […]