Although pieces of the law have been blocked by federal courts, some sections have gone into effect, including a provision that bans courts from enforcing contracts made with unauthorized immigrants. While some states have banned public agencies from making contracts with unauthorized immigrants, no state or developed country has prohibited courts from enforcing any contract with the undocumented, say experts in immigration and human rights.

“We don’t know of a similar parallel, either internationally or elsewhere in the United States, where contracts with unauthorized immigrants are deemed unenforceable,” says Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the Migration Policy Institute.

“The bottom line is that Alabama’s law is a complete outlier,” says Alison Parker, director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. program. “The only country where we are aware of something that comes close to what Alabama has done” is Italy, she said, pointing to a law that makes it illegal to rent to to unauthorized immigrants. “What they are doing in the state of Alabama runs in the face of human rights law.”

European countries have traditionally been viewed as less welcoming of immigrants than the United States, which for much of its history allowed migrant workers to cross the borders with Mexico and Canada without clearance from a government agency. Parker’s colleague Benjamin Ward, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s European program, called Alabama’s law “unbelievable and horrific.”

Throughout the twentieth century, border security efforts have steadily increased, and repeated attempts have been made to bring formerly unlimited quantities of new immigrants down to what’s considered by policymakers to be a manageable level.

But Parker says there’s an important distinction between controlling immigration at the border and stripping rights from immigrants already in the country.

“Everyone has the right to a family life, to a roof over one’s head, to compensation for work,” says Parker. “Once people are here, there are certain fundamental rights protected by human rights law.” European governments have tended to adhere to that standard.

Mittelstadt points out that immigrants in Europe tend to be registered with the government, which means that the contract rights of immigrants aren’t likely to be subject to Alabama-style laws: “In Europe, where national ID cards and registration programs for foreigners prevail, employers and others would not be likely to enter into contracts with unauthorized immigrants.”

At this point it’s unclear how the Alabama immigration law will be interpreted by the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, which is likely to step in now that the appellate courts have issued different decisions on state-level “enforcement only” laws (the Ninth Circuit upheld a decision to block Arizona’s immigration law from going into effect earlier this year).

The ban on contracts is especially murky, and there are few precedents that experts can point towards to predict its viability in the courts. The most relevant precedent could be a 2002 Supreme Court case, Hoffman Plastic v. NLRB, in which the court ruled that unauthorized immigrants aren’t entitled to back pay under the National Labor Relations Act. But the Court did establish that unauthorized immigrants were “employees” under the Act and had the right to organize.

However, it may be Alabama’s own state constitution that determines the fate of the contract ban.

As ThinkProgress reported, an Alabama state judge indicated in a decision earlier this week that the contract ban appears to violate Section 95 of Alabama’s own constitution, which states:

There can be no law of this state impairing the obligation of contracts by destroying or impairing the remedy for their enforcement; and the legislature shall have no power to revive any right or remedy which may have become barred by lapse of time, or by any statute of this state. After suit has been commenced on any cause of action, the legislature shall have no power to take away such cause of action, or destroy any existing defense to such suit.

In an opinion on a breach of contract lawsuit filed by an undocumented immigrant, Alabama Circuit Judge Scott Vowell wrote, “It may well be that that [the Alabama immigration law] also violates this section of the constitution” by “impairing the obligation of contracts.”

But since the case in question was filed before the immigration law went into effect, the judge didn’t outright rule the section unconstitutional, merely that the law could not take away an immigrant’s “cause of action” or “existing defense” after his or her case has already been filed.

The Papacy’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, this week published an editorial decrying the “failed utopia of sexual revolution” and suggested the policy will likely achieve the opposite of the desired effect, which is to reduce rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STD) throughout the city, especially in Latino and African-American communities. The Vatican called the initiative “useless and even harmful.”

The new policy goes into effect this school year, which officially begins for students on Sept. 8, and requires schools to teach students in sixth grade and up sex education that includes instruction on abstinence, the risks of unprotected sex, puberty and pregnancy. The new rules also mandate the teaching of healthy eating and the importance of regular exercise and gives parents the option of opting-out their children from discussions of birth control methods.

The Vatican’s stance on the issue, as voiced by L’Osservatore Romano’s Lucetta Scaraffia, is that while unintended pregnancy, STDs and abortion are existing problems worldwide, sex education is not the answer, and, in fact, decreases their rates. Scaraffia compared New York to Italy, which she said is “better off” because there is no compulsory sex education in schools.

[H]ere young people have a lower risk of disease and early pregnancy. This is thanks to the family, to the loving vigilance of parents over their children, to the fact that kids are not left to themselves with a box of contraceptives as the only defense against their passions and mistakes.

[...]

It is not clear why public institutions in the West continue to have such magical trust in the effectiveness of sex education. After years of courses, focused, of course, on contraceptive methods, we see that – for example in the UK – boys and girls continue to have early sexual intercourse without any kind of protection, and the number of pregnancies and abortions among adolescents has multiplied. By now, it is clear that to avoid these tragedies it is not enough to explain to them how they can use contraceptives, and where to easily find them, but that the problem is further upstream, in education and in the family.

The Archdiocese of New York has also openly criticized the initiative, calling the citywide sex-ed mandate “troubling.”

New York’s new law standardizes public-school sex education curriculum, which has been taught in most schools in various forms. The new curriculum will be taught in sixth and seventh grades and again in ninth and 10th grades.

In the U.S., 21 states and the District of Columbia mandate some type of sex education, and 33 states and the District of Columbia mandate HIV education, according to the Guttmacher Institute (PDF). Thirty-seven states require that where sex education is provided, information on abstinence must be given: Of those states, 26 require that abstinence be stressed, and 11 states require that abstinence be covered.

Ultimately, Scaraffia notes, the Catholic Church will continue to teach and promote public policies promoting the idea that “sexual relations are much more than some kind of pleasurable exercise to be practiced in an unbridled and risk-free way.”

President Obama at the G-20 Summit in Toronto on June 27 (Xinhua/ZUMApress.com)

BERLIN — President Obama’s push for additional economic stimulus is not just hitting a wall in Congress. The president has also been rebuffed by the largest European countries — with potentially profound consequences for the U.S. economy and Obama’s national agenda.

[Economy1] In the run-up to the G-20 summit in late June, the Obama administration went on a PR offensive, urging other wealthy nations to keep pumping stimulus into their economies. But with the Greek budget crisis heightening anxieties over public debt, conservative governments in Berlin, Paris, London and Rome are all on an austerity track. Instead of a pledge to inject more capital into their economies, all Obama got at the Toronto conference was a communique that emphasizes savings over stimulus.

Some economists fret that Europe’s fiscal retreat threatens to tip the U.S. deeper into recession. Meanwhile, leading analysts in Germany, the continent’s largest economy, say the trans-Atlantic spending spat underscores Obama’s limited maneuvering room in his effort to steer the fragile recovery back home.

“America is having enormous difficulties,” said economist Gustav Horn of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute, part of a labor-affiliated foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany. “At the moment, [the U.S.] is dependent on the rest of the world offering it a friendly economic environment.”

For Obama, the environment is less friendly than he would like. In an open letter to other G-20 heads of state before the summit, the president wrote that leaders should “learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, meanwhile, told the BBC, “Growth in the future around the world can’t depend on the United States as much as it did in the past.”

Some economists warn that austerity in the largest European economies, combined with severe budget cuts in countries such as Greece and Spain, could push the continent into a double-dip recession. If so, the consequences for the U.S. could be severe. A European downturn, Horn said, would hurt American exports, both by lowering demand and by strengthening the dollar. Perhaps more importantly, he added, a stumbling Europe could weaken crucial U.S. trading partners in Asia. Likewise, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently warned that the resistance to more stimulus in Europe and the U.S. raises the specter of a depression.

But the dominant view in Germany is that such fears are misguided. Supporters of budget consolidation note the country is on an upswing, with GDP growth expected to reach as high as 2 percent this year as exports accelerate. Moreover, they argue that fiscal retrenchment will spur private-sector spending. A recent report by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, a Munich-based think tank with government funding, says cuts would lead to an “expansive confidence effect on German consumers and investors.”

The fear that a European slowdown could hurt American trade underscores a more fundamental challenge that German economists say the U.S. must tackle: expanding exports as a source of economic growth.

“Before the crisis, we had a consumption boom in the U.S. that was not sustainable,” said Ifo economist Klaus Abberger. “And so we think there is a need for some redirection.”

That redirection, economists say, will be outward.

“The growth driver you’ve got left is ultimately net exports,” said economist Christian Dreger of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research, another government-funded think tank.

The Obama administration has come to a similar conclusion. In his State of the Union speech in January, the president announced a new initiative to double American exports within five years, though many analysts called the goal unrealistic.

“For too long, America served as the consumer engine for the entire world,” the president said in follow-up remarks in March. “But we’re rebalancing. … Countries with external deficits need to save and export more.”

But the future of U.S. exports is not entirely under American control. The country can only reduce its trade deficit if the rest of the world has sufficient buying power, Horn said. The G-20 has been touting a new initiative to ease trade imbalances, which would require net exporters like Germany to buy more from net importers like the U.S. But it remains to be seen whether there will be any action to follow the talk.

Obama’s inability to induce Europe to boost its stimulus spending is rendered even more discouraging by the limited traction his spending proposals are getting in Congress. And it does not help that Obama is looking increasingly isolated among world leaders in pushing a more expansive fiscal policy.

“You don’t win something in Congress by saying, oh, Europe’s doing this,” said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “[But] you don’t want the U.S. to look like an outlier.”

The president should not get his hopes up for a hand from Berlin, though. As the Berliner Zeitung newspaper declared of Germany’s chancellor in a recent headline: “Merkel won’t listen to Obama.” The country has a culture of thriftiness to rival even the fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. The traumatic hyperinflation that racked the Weimar Republic during the 1920s has made Germany hyper-sensitive to price stability. The country last year amended its constitution to include limits on government debt. Deep concern that the aging of the population will soon make Germany’s welfare state unaffordable have made people here anxious to get back to budget cutting. Meanwhile, unemployment is lower than in the U.S., so the economic pain is less acute.

Deficit hawks here also argue the turmoil in Greece is a warning to profligate governments across the continent.

“We saw with the Greek crisis how vulnerable highly indebted countries are to [speculative] attack,” said Norbert Barthle, a member of the German parliament from the ruling center-right Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) who specializes in budgeting.

The American economy has managed impressive growth so far this year, but it has largely been driven by the effects of government stimulus, Horn said. And the looming dry-up of stimulus funds around the world amounts to a serious problem for the American president.

“He has to do more if other countries do less,” Horn said. “And in that sense, his worries are absolutely understandable.”

David Dagan is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.

So despite calls by experts like Simon Johnson for more regulation of trades and even for the blacklisting of Goldman Sachs in Europe or in sovereign debt markets generally, European countries have a disincentive to do more than point fingers and talk about how it’s all Goldman’s fault. They’ve all been dancing with the debt-masking devil, be it at Goldman or elsewhere. If they kick Goldman off the floor, it’ll be easy enough to find a new partner, and if they make the dance illegal, it’s their public balance sheets that will suffer — and their politicians’ butts on the line. It’s not just Goldman whose hands will end up tied: EU member countries will end up tying their own hands as well, and everyone knows politicians hate to be left with nothing but transparency and honesty.

I’m hearing from allied diplomats that some nations may be more inclined to contribute additional troops at a scheduled late January summit on Afghanistan in London. Allied governments are still studying the Obama administration’s adjusted strategy. Some of them want to see if they can harmonize troop contribution agreements amongst European countries before pledging anything. One diplomat described this process to me as “fast-moving,” and another issue, inevitably, will be whether there is a sense of internal NATO diplomatic momentum in favor of adding troops in two months. Italy and Britain have already announced troop increases. More may yet come, even after the Brussels ministerial ends.

The detainee headed for Hungary is identified only as being “from the West Bank.” The Justice Department said that the government of Hungary wanted his identity withheld for security and privacy purposes.

The detainee transferred to France is Sabir Lahmar, a native of Algeria. In November 2008 Lahmar won his petition for habeas corpus in a federal court, which ruled that he could no longer be lawfully detained and ordered the government to arrange for his release.

The two detainees transferred to Italy are Abel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, both of Tunisia. Both were cleared for release by the government’s Guantanamo Review Task Force.  Both are the subject of outstanding arrest warrants in Italy, where they will be prosecuted.

Approximately 210 detainees still remain at the U.S.-run detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Wow, who could that be? Remember this:

Well, you think, for example, in the intelligence arena. We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the — in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions.It’s a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community. If they assume that they’re going to have to be dealing with the political consequences — and it’s clearly a political move. I mean, there’s no other rationale for why they’re doing this — then they’ll be very reluctant in the future to do that.

Back in the real world, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s decisions to embrace illegality and instruct CIA operatives to carry it out have resulted in the actual convictions in absentia of 23 people. What do you think the odds are that Cheney will pay deSouza’s legal bills with all his oil money?

An Italian judge sentenced 23 former CIA agents to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric in a landmark ruling against the “rendition” flights used by the former U.S. government.

The Americans were tried in absentia for the 2003 kidnapping, in a case that garnered headlines around the world.

Even assuming this is true, the story has no real implication for Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s efforts at reconciliation with lower- to mid-level Taliban fighters. Well, no implication beyond this observation:

“One cannot be too doctrinaire about these things,” a senior Nato officer in Kabul said. “It might well make sense to buy off local groups and use non-violence to keep violence down. But it is madness to do so and not inform your allies.”

There could be situations — and I emphasize could be, because we haven’t made a determination yet — where, let’s say that we have a well-known al-Qaeda operative, doesn’t surface very often, [and who] appears in a third country with whom we don’t have an extradition relationship or isn’t willing to prosecute. And we think [this operative] is a very dangerous person. I think we still have to think about how we deal with that scenario, in a way that comports with international law, that abides by my very clear edict that we don’t torture and that we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining, through habeas corpus, an opportunity to answer to charges. How all that sorts itself out is extremely complicated, because it’s not just domestic law, it’s also international law. Our relationship with various other entities. So, again, it will take this year to be able to get all these procedures in place and on the right footing.

The hypothetical scenario he’s describing isn’t extraordinary rendition, the process by which the United States would transfer a detainee extra-judicially into the custody of another country, typically as a method of claiming not to know that the detainee is tortured. It’s more like a tweaked version of the infamous case of Abu Omar, whom CIA and Italian intelligence agents abducted off the streets of Milan on suspicion of involvement with terrorism and handed to the Egyptian security service. Abu Omar told Peter Bergen last year what happened to him:

Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped. He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified “problems with my wife at home.”

An Italian judge has indicted 25 CIA operatives and an Air Force colonel for their involvement in Abu Omar’s abduction. Since the U.S. refuses to extradite them, they’re being tried in absentia.

Assume for a moment that the hypothetical scenario Obama outlines is enshrined as U.S. policy tomorrow. That would mean the next Abu Omar would be snatched by the CIA from some country and eventually handed over to the custody of either another U.S. agency — as the CIA is out of the “long-term” detention business — and a process ensues whereby s/he can challenge the basis for his/her detention. The individual would have to be interrogated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And this would all have to comport with international law. I am unsure of what basis there is for rendition in international law and would love to be enlightened on that score.