Mr. President, Members of the Court, I am a devoted but disgruntled South Australian. “I hereby declare the independence of South Australia.” What has happened? Precisely nothing. Have I committed an internationally wrongful act in your presence? Of course not. Have I committed an ineffective act? Very likely. I have […]
Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers. Just to add that at the funeral of Zoran Djindjic Robin Cook represented the UK. He privately told some of the assembled foreign dignitaries how we was about to resign from the government two days later over Iraq, as indeed he did. Robin Cook did not resign […]
Let’s pull together some news about the UK Foreign Office in the word’s first blogged FCO Roundup. Or is the news that it has … gone AWOL? * * * * * What has the FCO to say about the elections in Honduras? Not much. HM Government do not have […]
Meanwhile over at the ICJ the USA and Russia (and Spain and Finland) have been giving their views. The USA arguments are smooth, somehow rather personal and elegant (including a nice oblique reference to Sherlock Holmes – the dog which did not bark, from Silver Blaze). The Russians are more formalistic […]
Remember the Sharpeville Six? They were six South Africans convicted of the murder of a local township leader who ‘collaborated’ with the apartheid regime. Their case became an international symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle. What happened? In early September 1984 in Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg) township protesters angered at rent rises converged upon the house of […]
More on European Foreign Policy – and Physics (or maybe Maths). Take two tennis balls, A and B. A is twice the size of B. By which I mean that the diameter of A is twice the diameter length (the straight line across the widest part of the inside of the ball) of […]
As readers of this website know only too well, the Kosovo case is fascinating and stunningly difficult on multiple levels simultaneously. Political, moral, precedental, timescale, ethnic, existential. The territory of Kosovo itself is smallish by international standards, ranking at 168th out of 249 countries listed in the CIA World Factbook – […]
The Times leader on President Sarkozy’s insistence that the ‘European’ economic model must now prevail over the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model: This is economically illiterate populism. No policymaker in the English-speaking economies believes in totally unconstrained and unregulated capitalism. You need to go to some fairly obscure corners to find anyone at […]
The Advisory Opinion hearings at the International Court of Justice on the Serbia/Kosovo question have started. The curious thing about this one is the actual question which the ICJ is tasked by the UN General Assembly to address: Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government […]
Via Samizdata this link to a magnificent address by C S Lewis back in 1944, The Inner Ring (scroll down towards the bottom to find it). This masterpiece is all about the idea that whever you are – school, work, art, politics – there is always an ‘inner ring’ of people […]
