North America

I. Introduction

 

According to news reports, Robert Mugabe, the head of state of Zimbabwe, was served with process while he was in New York City for the United Nations Millennium Summit, in a suit brought by Zimbabwean nationals seeking civil damages under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). The suit alleges that Mugabe orchestrated violence by his political party against its opponents, including beating and burning the plaintiffs or, in one case, the husband of a plaintiff, in order to stay in power at the time of Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections in June.

 

In a long-awaited decision confronting the intersection of federalism and foreign relations, the Supreme Court has struck down a Massachusetts law restricting state purchases from companies doing business in Burma. The Court's June 19 ruling in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council was on narrow, non-constitutional grounds. Although the decision puts similar state and local anti-Burma measures at least temporarily on ice, it is unlikely to emerge as the final word on foreign policymaking by state and local actors.

 

On April 11, 2001 the US and the EU reached an agreement (the "Agreement") in the decade-long dispute over the EU's banana import regime.  The Agreement requires the EU to abandon its proposal to institute on July 1 a "first-come-first-served" licensing regulation and to move in 2 stages to a tariff-only system by 2006.

 

Agriculture has traditionally been a primary source of economic tension between the United States and the European Union. The dispute over the EU's banana regime has been among the most contentious in recent years. It is also among the more legally and politically complex. 

 

In its current Term, the Supreme Court will address aspects of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act for the first time since its decision in Saudi Arabia v. Nelson a decade earlier. [1]   Although the issues in Dole Food Company v. Patrickson appear technical, they are not without practical significance, and one of them raises profound questions about the nature of foreign sovereign immunity.