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The Obama Administration and International Law
Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law
Washington, DC
March 25, 2010
Thank you, Dean Areen, for that very generous introduction, and very special thanks to my good friends President Lucy Reed and Executive Director Betsy Andersen for the extraordinary work you do with the American Society of International Law. It has been such a great joy in my new position to be able to collaborate with the Society on so many issues.
It is such a pleasure to be back here at the ASIL. I am embarrassed to confess that I have been a member of ASIL for more than 30 years, since my first year of law school, and coming to the annual meeting has always been a highlight of my year. As a young lawyer just out of law school I would come to the American Society meeting and stand in the hotel lobby gaping at all the famous international lawyers walking by: for international lawyers, that is as close as we get to watching the Hollywood stars stroll the red carpet at the Oscars! And last year at this time, when this meeting was held, I was still in the middle of my confirmation process. So under the arcane rules of that process, I was allowed to come here to be seen, but not heard. So it is a pleasure finally to be able to address all of you and to give you my perspective on the Obama Administration’s approach to international law.
Let me start by bringing you special greetings from someone you already know.
As you saw, my client, Secretary Clinton very much wanted to be here in person, but as you see in the headlines, this week she has been called away to Mexico, to meeting visiting Pakistani dignitaries, to testify on Capitol Hill, and many other duties. As you can tell, she is very proud of the strong historical relationship between the American Society and the State Department, and she is determined to keep it strong. As the Secretary mentioned, I and another long time member of the Society, your former President Anne Marie Slaughter of the Policy Planning Staff join her every morning at her 8:45 am senior staff meeting, so the spirit of the American Society is very much in the room (and the smell of the Society as well, as I am usually there at that hour clutching my ASIL coffee mug!)
Since this is my first chance to address you as Legal Adviser, I thought I would speak to three issues. First, the nature of my job as Legal Adviser. Second, to discuss the strategic vision of international law that we in the Obama Administration are attempting to implement. Third and finally, to discuss particular issues that we have grappled with in our first year in a number of high-profile areas: the International Criminal Court, the Human Rights Council, and what I call The Law of 9/11: detentions, use of force, and prosecutions.
I. The Role of the Legal Adviser
First, my job. I have now been the Legal Adviser of the State Department for about nine months. This is a position I first heard of about 40 years ago, and it has struck me throughout my career as the most fascinating legal job in the U.S. Government. Now that I’ve actually been in the job for awhile, I have become even more convinced that that is true, for four reasons.
First, I have absolutely extraordinary colleagues at the Legal Adviser’s Office, which we call “L,” which is surely the greatest international law firm in the world. Its numbers include many current lawyers and alumni who are sitting here in the audience, and it is a training ground for America’s international lawyers [To prove that point, could I have a show of hands of how many of you in the audience have worked in L sometime during your careers?] Our 175 lawyers are spread over 24 offices, including four extraordinary career deputies and a Counselor of International Law, nearly all of whom are members of this Society and many of whom you will find speaking on the various panels throughout this Annual Meeting program.
Second, I have extraordinary clients and you just saw one, Secretary Hillary Clinton, who is a remarkably able lawyer. Of course, another client of mine, the President, is also an outstanding lawyer, as are both Deputy Secretaries, the Department’s Counselor, the Deputy Chief of Staff, and a host of Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries.
Third, each day we tackle extraordinarily fascinating legal questions. When I was a professor, I would spend a lot of time trying to think up exam questions. For those of you who are professors, this job literally presents you with a new exam question every single day. For example, I had never really thought about the question: “can you attach a panda?” Or the question, can Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi erect a tent in Englewood, New Jersey, notwithstanding a contrary local ordinance? To be honest, I had never really thought about those questions. But rest assured, in the future, many Yale law students will.
Fourth and finally, my position allows me to play extraordinary and varied roles. Some government lawyers have the privilege for example, of giving regular advice to a particularly prominent client or pleading particular cases before a particular court. But the Legal Adviser must shift back and forth constantly between four rich and varied roles: which I call counselor, conscience, defender of U.S. interests, and spokesperson for international law.
As Counselor, I mean obviously, that the Legal Adviser must play all the traditional functions of an agency general counsel, but with a twist. Like every in-house counsel’s office, we do buildings and acquisitions, but those buildings may well be in Afghanistan or Beijing. We review government contracts, but they may require contracting activities in Iraq or Pakistan. We review employment decisions, but with respect to employees with diplomatic and consular immunities or special visa problems.
But in addition to being counselors, we also serve as a conscience for the U.S. Government with regard to international law. The Legal Adviser, along with many others in policy as well as legal positions, offers opinions on both the wisdom and morality of proposed international actions. For it is the unique role of the Legal Adviser’s Office to coordinate and render authoritative legal advice for the State Department on international legal issues, or as Dick Bilder once put it, to “speak law to power.” In this role, the Legal Adviser must serve not only as a source of black letter advice to his clients, but more fundamentally, as a source of good judgment. That means that one of the most important roles of the Legal Adviser is to advise the Secretary when a policy option being proposed is “lawful but awful.” As Herman Pfleger, one former Legal Adviser, put it: “You should never say no to your client when the law and your conscience say yes; but you should never, ever say yes when your law and conscience say no.” And because my job is simply to provide the President and the Secretary of State with the very best legal advice that I can give them, I have felt little conflict with my past roles as a law professor, dean and human rights lawyer, because as my old professor, former legal adviser Abram Chayes, once put it: “There’s nothing wrong with a lawyer holding the United States to its own best standards and principles.”
A fourth and final role for the Legal Adviser, and the reason I’m here tonight, is to act as a spokesperson for the US Government about why international law matters. Many people don’t understand why obeying our international commitments is both right and smart, and that is a message that this Administration, and I as Legal Adviser, are committed to spreading.
II. The Strategic Vision
That brings me to my second topic: what strategic vision of international law are we trying to implement? How does obeying international law advance U.S foreign policy interests and strengthen America’s position of global leadership? Or to put it another way, with respect to international law, is this Administration really committed to what our President has famously called “change we can believe in”? Some, including a number of the panelists who have addressed this conference, have argued that there is really more continuity than change from the last administration to this one.
To them I would answer that, of course, in foreign policy, from administration to administration, there will always be more continuity than change; you simply cannot turn the ship of state 360 degrees from administration to administration every four to eight years, nor should you. But, I would argue—and these are the core of my remarks today-- to say that is to understate the most important difference between this administration and the last: and that is with respect to its approach and attitude toward international law. The difference in that approach to international law I would argue is captured in an Emerging “Obama-Clinton Doctrine,” which is based on four commitments: to: 1. Principled Engagement; 2. Diplomacy as a Critical Element of Smart Power; 3. Strategic Multilateralism; and 4. the notion that Living Our Values Makes us Stronger and Safer, by Following Rules of Domestic and International Law; and Following Universal Standards, Not Double Standards.
As articulated by the President and Secretary Clinton, I believe the Obama/Clinton doctrine reflects these four core commitments. First, a Commitment to Principled Engagement: A powerful belief in the interdependence of the global community is a major theme for our President, whose father came from a Kenyan family and who as a child spent several years in Indonesia.
Second, a commitment to what Secretary Clinton calls “smart power”—a blend of principle and pragmatism” that makes “intelligent use of all means at our disposal,” including promotion of democracy, development, technology, and human rights and international law to place diplomacy at the vanguard of our foreign policy.
Third, a commitment to what some have called Strategic Multilateralism: the notion acknowledged by President Obama at Cairo, that the challenges of the twenty-first century “can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation” and must therefore be addressed by open dialogue and partnership by the United States with peoples and nations across traditional regional divides, “based on mutual interest and mutual respect” as well as acknowledgment of “the rights and responsibilities of [all] nations.”
And fourth and finally, a commitment to living our values by respecting the rule of law, As I said, both the President and Secretary Clinton are outstanding lawyers, and they understand that by imposing constraints on government action, law legitimates and gives credibility to governmental action. As the President emphasized forcefully in his National Archives speech and elsewhere, the American political system was founded on a vision of common humanity, universal rights and rule of law. Fidelity to [these] values” makes us stronger and safer. This also means following universal standards, not double standards. In his Nobel lecture at Oslo, President Obama affirmed that “[a]dhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates those who don’t.” And in her December speech on a 21st Century human rights agenda, and again two weeks ago in introducing our annual human rights reports, Secretary Clinton reiterated that “a commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves.”
Now in implementing this ambitious vision—this Obama-Clinton doctrine based on principled international engagement, smart power, strategic multilateralism, and the view that global leadership flows to those who live their values and obey the law and global standards—I am reminded of two stories.
The first, told by a former teammate is about the late Mickey Mantle of the American baseball team, the New York Yankees, who, having been told that he would not play the next day, went out and got terrifically drunk (as he was wont to do). The next day, he arrived at the ballpark, somewhat impaired, but in the late innings was unexpectedly called upon to pinch-hit. After staggering out to the field, he swung wildly at the first two pitches and missed by a mile. But on the third pitch, he hit a tremendous home run. And when he returned to the dugout, he squinted out at the wildly cheering crowd and confided to his teammates, “[t]hose people don’t know how hard that really was.”
In much the same way, I learned that the making of U.S. foreign policy is infinitely harder than it looks from the ivory tower. Why? Because, as lawyers, we are accustomed to the relatively orderly world of law and litigation, which is based on a knowable and identifiable structure and sequence of events. The workload comes with courtroom deadlines, page limits and scheduled arguments. But if conducting litigation is like climbing a ladder, making foreign policy is much more like driving the roundabout near the Coliseum in Rome.
In this maze of bureaucratic politics, you are only one lawyer, and there is only so much that any one person can do. Collective government decision-making creates enormous coordination problems. We in the Legal Adviser’s Office are not the only lawyers in government: On any given issue, my office needs to reach consensus decisions with all of the other interested State Department bureaus, but our Department as a whole then needs to coordinate its positions not just with other government law offices, which include: our lawyer clients (POTUS/SecState/DepSecState); White House Lawyers (WHCounsel/NSC Legal Counsel/USTR General Counsel); DOD Lawyers (OGC, Jt Staff, CoComs, Services, JAGs); DOJ Lawyers (OLC, OSG, Litigating Divisions-Civ., Crim, OIL, NSD); IC Lawyers (DNI, CIA); DHS Lawyers, not to mention lawyers in the Senate and House.
To make matters even more complex, we participate in a complicated web of legal processes within processes: the policy process, the clearance process, the interagency process, the legislative process; and once a U.S. position is developed, an intergovernmental lawyering process. So unlike academics, who are accustomed to being individualists, in government you are necessarily part of a team. One obvious corollary to this is that as one government lawyer, your views and the views of your client are not the only views that matter. As Walter Dellinger observed when he worked at OLC:
"[U]nlike an academic lawyer, an executive branch attorney may have an obligation to work within a tradition of reasoned, executive branch precedent, memorialized in formal written opinions. Lawyers in the executive branch have thought and written for decades about the President’s legal authority… When lawyers who are now [in my office] begin to research an issue, they are not expected to turn to what I might have written or said in a floor discussion at a law professors’ convention. They are expected to look to the previous opinions of the Attorneys General and of heads of this office to develop and refine the executive branch’s legal positions."[]
Now to say that is not to say that one administration cannot or should not reverse a previous administration’s legal positions. But what it does mean, as I noted at my confirmation hearings, is that government lawyers should begin with a presumption of stare decisis--that an existing interpretation of the Executive Branch should stand-- unless after careful review, a considered reexamination of the text, structure, legislative or negotiating history, purpose and practice under the treaty or statute firmly convinces us that a change to the prior interpretation is warranted.
So that is what I mean when I say it’s harder than it looks. And as those listening who have served in government know, it is a lot harder to get from a good idea to the implementation of that idea than those outside the government can imagine.
That brings me to my second, shorter story: about two Irishmen walking down the road near Galway. One of them asks the other, "So how do you get to Dublin?" And the other answers, "I wouldn't start from here."
In the same way, given the choice, no one would have started with what we inherited: the worst recession since the Depression, with conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, against al-Qaeda. Add to this mix a difficult and divided political environment, which makes it very difficult to get 60 Senate votes for cloture, much less the 67 you would need for treaty ratification, and such thorny carryover issues as resuming international engagement, closing Guantanamo, not to mention tackling an array of new challenges brought to us by the 21st century: climate change, attendant shifts in the polar environment; cyber crime, aggression and terrorism, food security, and global health just to name a few. Just to round things out, throw in a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, another earthquake in Chile, four feet of snow in Washington, and you might well say to yourselves, to coin a phrase, “I wouldn’t start from here.”
But that having been said, how have we played the hand we have been dealt? What legal challenges do we face? There are really five fields of law that have occupied most of my time: what I call the law of international justice and dispute resolution, the law of 9/11, the law of international agreements, the law of the State Department, and the law of globalization. Tonight I want to focus on the first two of these areas: the law of international justice and dispute resolution and the law of 9/11. For they best illustrate how we have tried to implement the four themes I have outlined: principled engagement, multilateralism, smart power, and living our values.
III. Current Legal Challenges
A. International Justice and Dispute Resolution
By international justice and dispute resolution, I refer to the U.S.’s renewed relationship to international tribunals and other international bodies. Let me address two of them: the International Criminal Court and the U.N. Human Rights Council. As President Obama recognized, “a new era of engagement has begun and renewed respect for international law and institutions is critical if we are to resume American leadership in a new global century.”
1. The International Criminal Court
With respect to the U.S. relationship to the ICC, let me report on my recent participation in the Resumed 8th Session of ICC Assembly of States Parties in New York, from which I have just returned. Last November, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Stephen Rapp and I led an interagency delegation that resumed engagement with the Court by attending a meeting of the ICC Assembly of States Parties (ASP). This was the first time that the United States had attended such a meeting, and this week’s New York meeting continued that November session. As you know, the United States is not party to the Rome Statute, but we have attended these meetings as an observer. Our goal in November was to listen and learn, and by listening to gain a better understanding of the issues being considered by the ASP and of the workings of the International Criminal Court.
Significantly, although during the last decade the U.S. was largely absent from the ICC, our historic commitment to the cause of international justice has remained strong. As you all know, we have not been silent in the face of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As one of the vigorous supporters of the work of the ad hoc tribunals regarding the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and Lebanon, the United States has worked for decades, and we will continue to work, with other States to ensure accountability on behalf of victims of such crimes. But as some of those ad hoc war crimes tribunals enter their final years, the eyes of the world are increasingly turned toward the ICC. At the end of May, the United States will attend the ASP’s Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda. There are two key items on the agenda: stock-taking and aggression.
In the current situation where the Court has open investigations and prosecutions in relation to four situations, but has not yet concluded any trials, the stock-taking exercise is designed to address ways to strengthen the Court, and includes issues such as state cooperation; complementarity; effect on victims; peace and justice; and universality of membership. Even as a non-State party, the United States believes that it can be a valuable partner and ally in the cause of advancing international justice. The Obama Administration has been actively looking at ways that the U.S. can, consistent with U.S. law, assist the ICC in fulfilling its historic charge of providing justice to those who have endured crimes of epic savagery and scope. And as Ambassador Rapp announced in New York, we would like to meet with the Prosecutor at the ICC to examine whether there are specific ways that the United States might be able to support the particular prosecutions that already underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Central African Republic, and Uganda.
But as for the second agenda item, the definition of the crime of aggression, the United States has a number of serious concerns and questions. The crime of aggression, which is a jus ad bellum crime based on acts committed by the state, fundamentally differs from the other three crimes under the Court’s jurisdiction—genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—which are jus in bello crimes directed against particular individuals. In particular, we are concerned that adopting a definition of aggression at this point in the court’s history could divert the ICC from its core mission, and potentially politicize and weaken this young institution. Among the States Parties we found strongly held, yet divergent, views on many fundamental and unresolved questions.
First, there are questions raised by the terms of the definition itself, including the degree to which it may depart from customary international law of both the “crime of aggression” and the state “act of aggression.” This encompasses questions like what does it mean when the current draft definition requires that an act of aggression must be a “manifest” –as opposed to an “egregious” violation of the U.N. Charter?
A second question of who decides. The United States believes that investigation or prosecution of the crime of aggression should not take place absent a determination by the U.N. Security Council that aggression has occurred. The U.N. Charter confers on the Security Council the responsibility for determining when aggression has taken place. We are concerned by the confusion that might arise if more than one institution were legally empowered to make such a determination in the same case, especially since these bodies, under the current proposal, would be applying different definitions of aggression.
Third, there are questions about how such a crime would potentially affect the Court at this point in its development. For example, how would the still-maturing Court be affected if its prosecutor were mandated to investigate and prosecute this crime, which by its very nature, even if perfectly defined, would inevitably be seen as political--both by those who are charged, as well as by those who believe aggressors have been wrongly left uncharged? To what extent would the availability of such a charge place burdens on the prosecutor in every case, both those in which he chooses to charge aggression and those in which he does not? If you think of the Court as a wobbly bicycle that is finally starting to move forward, is this frankly more weight than the bicycle can bear?
Fourth, would adopting the crime of aggression at this time advance or hinder the key goals of the stock-taking exercise: promoting complementarity, cooperation, and universality? With respect to complementarity, how would this principle apply to a crime of aggression? Do we want national courts to pass judgment on public acts of foreign states that are elements of the crime of aggression? Would adding at this time a crime that would run against heads of state and senior leaders enhance or obstruct the prospects for state cooperation with the Court? And will moving to adopt this highly politicized crime at a time when there is genuine disagreement on such issues enhance the prospects for universal adherence to the Rome Statute?
All of these questions go to our ultimate concern: has a genuine consensus yet emerged to finalize a definition of the crime of aggression? What outcome in Kampala will truly strengthen the Court at this critical moment in its history? What we heard at the Resumed Session in New York is that no clear consensus has yet emerged on many of these questions. Because this is such a momentous decision for this institution, which would bring about such an organic change in the Court’s work, that we believe that we should leave no stone unturned in search of genuine consensus. And we look forward to discussing these important issues with as many States Parties and Non States Parties as possible between now and what we hope will be a successful Review Conference in Kampala.
2. Human Rights Council
In addition to reengaging with the ICC, the United States has also reengaged the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. Along with my long time friend and colleague, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner, who has my old job, and Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Esther Brimmer, I had the privilege of leading the first U.S. delegation to return to the Human Rights Council this past September.
You know the history: In March 2006, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to replace the flawed Human Rights Commission with this new body: the Human Rights Council. The last Administration participated actively in the negotiations in New York to reform the Commission, but ultimately voted against adoption of the UNGA resolution that created the HRC, and decided not to run for a seat.
The UNGA resolution that created the HRC made a number of important changes from the commission process: it created the Universal Periodic Review process, a mandatory process of self-examination and peer review that requires each U.N. member state to defend its own record before the HRC every four years. The Obama Administration would like our report to serve as a model for the world. Accordingly, we are preparing our first UPR report, which will be presented this November, with outreach sessions in an unprecedented interagency listening tour being conducted in about ten locations around the United States to hear about human rights concerns from civil society, community leaders, and tribal governments. Second, the HRC and its various subsidiary bodies and mechanisms meet far more frequently throughout the year than did the Commission, a pace that exhausts delegations. Third, the election criteria were revised. So while HRC membership still includes a number of authoritarian regimes that do not respect human rights, the election requirement of a majority of UNGA votes in often competitive elections has led to certain countries being defeated for membership and others declining to run for a seat. The rule that only one-third of membership (16 members) can convene a special session, has led to a disproportionate number of special sessions dedicated to criticism of Israel, which already is the only country with a permanent agenda item dedicated to examination of its human rights practices: an unbalanced focus that we have clearly and consistently criticized.
When the Obama Administration took office, we faced two choices with respect to the Human Rights Council: we could continue to stay away, and watch the flaws continue and possibly get worse, or we could engage and fight for better outcomes on human rights issues, even if they would not be easy to achieve. With the HRC, as with the ICC and other fora, we have chosen principled engagement and strategic multilateralism. While the institution is far from perfect, it is important and deserves the long-term commitment of the United States, and the United States must deploy its stature and moral authority to improve the U.N. human rights system where possible. This is a long-term effort, but one that we are committed to seeing through to success consistent with the basic goals of the Obama-Clinton doctrine: principled engagement and universality of human rights law. Our inaugural session as an HRC member in September saw some important successes, most notably the adoption by consensus of a freedom of expression resolution, which we co-sponsored with Egypt, that brought warring regional groups together and preserved the resolution as a vehicle to express firm support for freedom of speech and expression. This resolution was a way of implementing some of the themes in President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo, bridging geographic and cultural divides and dealing with global issues of discrimination and intolerance. We also joined country resolutions highlighting human rights situations in Burma, Somalia, Cambodia, and Honduras, and were able to take positions joined by other countries on several resolutions on which the United States previously would have been isolated, including ones on toxic waste and the financial crisis. The challenges in developing a body that fairly and even-handedly addresses human rights issues are significant, but we will continue to work toward that end.
At the March HRC session, which ends tomorrow, we have continued to pursue principled engagement by taking on a variety of initiatives at the HRC that seek to weaken protections on freedom of expression, in particular, the push of some Council Members to ban speech that “defames” religions, such as the Danish cartoons. At this session, we made supported a country resolution on Guinea and made significant progress in opposing the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s highly problematic “defamation of religions” resolution, even while continuing to deal with underlying concerns about religious intolerance.
B. The Law of 9/11
Let me focus the balance of my remarks on that aspect of my job that I call “The Law of 9/11.” In this area, as in the other areas of our work, we believe, in the President’s words, that “living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger.”
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