Interview With Koffi Kouakou (APSACO 2019)

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly meets this week (Sept. 22-29) to celebrate its 75th anniversary and address significant global challenges. There is no shortage of them: a global pandemic, a devastating economic crisis, an unprecedented explosion in the number of refugees, and the beginning of a new normal of growing conflicts between the United States and China in the dispute for global hegemony. The circumstances are not very different from that problematic year – 1945 – ...

« Passionate, Black, visionary » Ana Paula Barreto talks about serious matters with great calm, taking time to reflect before answering questions, from New York. Born in Jardim Angela, a poor area of São Paulo, considered as the most dangerous neighbourhood in the world by the United Nations in 1996, she remembers the violence of the favelas. She doesn’t want to reduce her childhood « in a joyful family » to « the ugly », but one of her strongest memories is seeing the bodies of pe ...

U.S. stock and corporate bond markets performed extraordinarily well from the March financial shock caused by covid-19 to the end of last month. Then, three consecutive weeks of decline in the three major stock market indexes have been followed this week by a global slump attributed to fears of new lockdowns. A period of disconnect of financial markets with the underlying real economy has culminated in a revelation of the former’s high dependency to Federal Reserve policies. Discon ...

The right to self-determination was recently posited as one possible jus cogens norm. However, more than fifty years after jus cogens emerged in 1969, a standard test for identifying a norm as jus cogens has yet to be adopted. In 2019, the International Law Commission adopted the Draft Conclusions on jus cogens, together with the list of possible jus cogens norms . If the possibility of being shown to be false is not admitted when identifying a jus cogens norm, however, the identifi ...

On assiste, ces derniers mois, à un rebond des cours de l'or, le portant vers de nouveaux sommets. L'analyse des cours de ce précieux métal depuis deux siècles montre une grande stabilité jusqu'en 1971, date de l'abandon de la convertibilité or /dollar par les Etats-Unis, mais aussi de son mouvement erratique depuis cette date. Soumise aux lois du marché, cette matière première voit son cours dépendre essentiellement de la demande. Evolution qui confirme cet actif comme valeur refug ...

“Fathom the incredible, create the crazy” His warmth comes as naturally as his strong sense of empathy, obvious from the first encounter. No coincidence there: since his childhood, Kheston Walkins has a “fascination with the human brain” and its infinite possibilities. He spent time reading Encyclopedias and dictionaries when he was a child, rather than novels and history books. His mother, a teacher, “exchanged her sleep for our survival”, he says about his family, which has no sc ...

If America votes Donald Trump out of office in November, will he go? Just a few days ago (Sept. 13), one of Trump’s closest political friends, Roger Stone, publicly suggested to the President that if the votes should go against him, he should alert the military, ready to defend his power, and arrest opponents including the Clintons or Microsoft boss Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame. Stone was sentenced in February 2020 to 40 months in jail for witness tampering, making ...

Il semble pertinent, avant d’exposer un sujet aussi important qu’actuel, d’apporter deux remarques nécessaires. Elles auront la finalité, à la fois, de préciser les contours du sujet et de prendre en considération la réalité du droit international. La première remarque consiste à faire la distinction entre le droit international de l’eau et le droit international à l’eau. Ce dernier constitue un avatar du corpus du premier et une étape nouvelle dans sa « juridicisation » et son évol ...