I have a question about my Law Stack Exchange post: Can a country refuse to enforce international law even if it does not violate existing law?
Why did this question get downvotes when it was well-answered?
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2 Answers
I can only speculate, since I'm not one of the people that downvoted it...but I'll give it a shot. My guess is that it was downvoted for a couple reasons:
The question in the title is somewhat unclear: it's not totally clear what you mean by "if it does not violate existing law." The phrasing makes it sound like you're saying the law doesn't violate existing law, which doesn't really make sense. A better title might be something like "Can a country refuse to enforce another country's laws forbidding conduct that is legal under the country's own laws?".
This lack of clarity is reinforced by a few comments mentioning that they found it unclear and asking clarifying questions, as well as a pending suggested edit trying to rephrase the title (you should either accept or reject it).
It's also somewhat of an unrealistic hypothetical. No country would ever make a law demanding a $1 billion payment for the mere act of making a website accessible to its citizens, residents, or anyone within the borders of the country. Compliance with such a law would be more or less impossible. A more realistic hypothetical might have fared better.
Apart from the aforementioned unnecessarily ridiculous nature of the statute and the unclarity of the question as asked, this is also a generally-asked-and-answered question: does every nation have to enforce the laws of every other nation (we've had a thousand variants of that question)? Tossing in the option to go to war is legal fantasy and irrelevant, but your question about treaties should have given you a start at self-answering the question (what kind of treaty?; why does it matter if there is a treaty?).
