International Law Archive

Last week’s special session of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), convened primarily to secure emergency funding for enhanced safeguards activities in Iran, provided an acute reminder of both the IAEA’s importance and its precarious financial situation. The international community demands ongoing high performance from the agency, while chronically failing to replenish resources perilously close to exhaustion. And yet, given the agency’s central role in key nuclear nonproliferation and security efforts, the stakes could not be higher. The IAEA is integral to international efforts as diverse as implementing the interim nuclear deal—and any potential follow-on […]

After winning Kenya’s March 2013 presidential election, President Uhuru Kenyatta inherited the difficult task of leading East Africa’s most significant diplomatic and economic actor while simultaneously awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The charges, for alleged crimes against humanity, stemmed from Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections. Given Kenya’s historically strong ties to the West, the charges against Kenyatta and his deputy president, William Ruto, forced the new Jubilee coalition government onto an immediate diplomatic tightrope—one defined by an all-consuming campaign to weaken international support for the trials, while maintaining enough continuity of engagement with the West to prevent international […]

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Single Aviation Market (SAM), dubbed the open skies policy, seeks to liberalize air services under a single and unified air transport market in ASEAN by 2015. Air travel is part of a larger discussion among the proposed ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), whose objective is to increase economic integration among members through the harmonization of trade and investment policies under a single market and production base. The AEC, also slated for 2015, will rapidly transform the region into a fiercely competitive, unified player in the world’s economy, boosting intraregional trade and investment flows […]

This month, thousands of African migrants to Israel, many seeking asylum, marched in Tel Aviv to demand more rights and protections from the Israeli government. In an email interview, Dov Waxman, associate professor of political science at Baruch College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as the co-director of the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development at Northeastern University, explained Israel’s immigration policy. WPR: What is the state of Israel’s overall immigration policy, particularly with regard to political refugees? Dov Waxman: Israel’s immigration policy fundamentally distinguishes between Jews, non-Jews […]

With the Obama administration moving toward its sixth year, the traditional nuclear arms control process—which has for the past several decades been driven in large part by a series of bilateral and multilateral treaties—appears to be lagging as nuclear threats and fears shift and as the U.S. political scene remains gridlocked. To move its broader nuclear agenda forward, the administration is pursuing mechanisms and institutions that allow the United States to build security and technical cooperation with partner nations without a time-consuming and politically bruising treaty ratification process. Some of these mechanisms are new, like the series of nuclear security […]