FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Status of Forces Agreement

About.com defines a Status or Forces Agreement as:

An agreement which defines the legal position of a visiting military force deployed in the territory of a friendly state. Agreements delineating the status of visiting military forces may be bilateral or multilateral. Provisions pertaining to the status of visiting forces may be set forth in a separate agreement, or they may form a part of a more comprehensive agreement. These provisions describe how the authorities of a visiting force may control members of that force and the amenability of the force or its members to the local law or to the authority of local officials. To the extent that agreements delineate matters affecting the relations between a military force and civilian authorities and population, they may be considered as civil affairs agreements.

You can read more about Status of Forces Agreements on the US. State Department web site here and on Wikipedia here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

UN Opens Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for Signature

The United Nations opened the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on March 30, 2007. The Convention is the first new human rights instrument of the 21st century. See the video of the press conference here: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/pressconference/pc070330.rm

“What the Convention endeavours to do," said Don MacKay, Chairman of the committee that negotiated the treaty, "is to elaborate in detail the rights of persons with disabilities and set out a code of implementation”. Excerpt from The Convention in Brief on the Covention website: http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/convention.shtml

News story reported at the Jurist website: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/index.php?edition=full

Posted by Marin Dell

Where was the HMS Cornwall?

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence has released the location of the HMS Cornwall at the time 15 of its Marines were detained by Iran: "...the merchant vessel was 7.5 nautical miles south east of the Al Faw Peninsula and clearly in Iraqi territorial waters...The position was 29 degrees 50.36 minutes North 048 degrees 43.08 minutes East. This places her 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi territorial waters."

The FSU College of Law Library has scanned and placed on its website documents and maps from the International Boundary Studies and Limits in the Seas series.  The 1978 International Boundary Study No. 164, Iran-Iraq Boundary, contains a brief description of the boundary, the historical background for the boundary setting, an analysis of the boundary alignment (including latitude and longitude markings at pp. 6-7), and a list of documents. 

The subsequent Limits in the Seas study, No. 114, Iran's Maritime Claims, analyzes the 1993 Iranian "Act on the Marine Areas of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Oman Sea."  A map of Iran's claims is part of the study.  Annex 1 (p. 27) contains the text of the Act.

Posted by Mary McCormick

The United Nations News Centre

Visit the UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/News/ for the latest UN statements and briefings, news conferences by the Secretary-General, and news by region.  Be sure to check out News Focus, the latest news on a particular topic such as combating terrorism or the new Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon. 

Posted by Marin Dell

Tenzin Tsundue

Ask me where I'm from and I won't have an answer. I feel I never really belonged anywhere. Never really had a home. I was born in Manali, but my parents live in Karnataka. Finishing my schooling in two different schools in Himachal Pradesh, my further studies took me Madras, Ladakh and Mumbai.[...] I have nowhere to call home and in the world at large all I'll ever be is a 'political refugee'.

These are the words of Tenzin Tsundue, "a talented activist poet and essayist of Tibetan extraction." Via  Amardeep Singh

Tsunde's latest words: Lhasa, in translation

In the Upper Valley
Is a three-peaked snowy mountain          
It is not a mountain
It is the throne of my guru
Of my Guru Padmasambhava

~A song of devotion to the Great Guru of Tibet, Padmasambhava (From A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey)

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Law of War

The online version of the Jurist has recently published two op-eds on the laws of war by Geoffrey S. Corn.  They are: When the Law of War Becomes Over-lawyered and For the Sake of Warriors: Accepting the Limits of the Law of War.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Geneva Conventions

The Geneva Conventions a Reference Guide can be found on the Society of Professional Journalists web site.  This includes both commentary and texts of the Geneva Conventions. 

It can be found here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The "You Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours" Business Model

How Some Firms in India Succeed by Bypassing Entrenched Financial and Legal Systems

And how things such as fictitious road repairs are getting a second look under the Right to Information Act (2005).

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Baffling Bookhouse

      

Turkmenistan has no private or foreign media, and the internet is inaccessible for most people. (via BBC)

Yet now the country has 'The House of Free Creativity,' a baffling book-shaped building "devoted to press freedom." Hmm...

Spookier things have happened.

Speaking of spooky, The Chicago Tribune is offering a story-shaped Halloween treat called A Secret Life, With Cats: A Ghost Story by Audrey Niffenegger. You can either read the story in seven short chapters or listen to the author read the chapters. In order to access either format, you will need to be registered with the Tribune. (Psst: Registration is free.)

Posted by Toni Urquhart                                   

Remainders

In describing an intuitive process native to novel writers, the author of Invisible Writer (Johnson, 1999, p.9) quotes American master of psychological realism, Joyce Carol Oates.

Somehow, without knowing what I did, without knowing, in fact, that I was doing anything extraordinary at all, I had written my mother’s story by way of a work of prose fiction I had invented.

The author of Invisible Writer says on the same page:

What Joyce did not mention is that a similar instance of her novelistic ‘intuition’ had occurred almost twenty years earlier. In A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), she had written a scene that also bears a striking resemblance to the circumstances of her grandfather’s murder.

Novelistic intuition. I’m curious to know what phrase will be coined to cover the writerly source of this short story, especially because of this. (Mrs. Oates's apology.)

--

A Research Fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford University and the Lokahi Foundation in London and author of a book to be published by Oxford University Press says he is “barred [...] from entering the United States to pursue an academic career.” (link)

--

Mr. Salman Rushdie has sold his literary papers to Emory University and according to The Guardian newspaper, his "decision to sell his literary papers to an American university should be applauded for highlighting a lamentable aspect of UK government policy." (link)

--

If you google, oops… [Note to self: To be on the safe side of the legal question, thall shalt not use Google as a verb (link)]. If you look for a Mr. Smiley III, you will learn that he is a thorn in the stacks of many libraries. (link)

--

Jeffrey Toobin interviews the Honorable Stephen G. Breyer. (video)

Posted by Toni Urquhart