In association with the International Commission of Jurists

August 2013

15 Aug

The United Nations Secretary General’s fifth Report on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was released last week.  This Report is titled “State Responsibility and Prevention” and focuses generally on governance mechanisms and early warning.  It also mentions the situation in Syria, stating that “[r]ecent events, including in the Syrian Arab Republic, underline the vital importance of early action to prevent...

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15 Aug

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called for the U.N. Security Council to convene quickly and act after what he described as a massacre in Egypt. The UN has said the departure of a team of chemical weapons inspectors to Syria was "imminent." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has insisted that US drone strikes must operate within international law. International medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has announced...

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14 Aug

North and South Korea are holding fresh talks on reopening the Kaesong joint industrial park, ahead of South Korea-US military exercises next week. United Nations inspectors are investigating a North Korean ship caught carrying arms from Cuba amid suspicion that the vessel is in breach of a wide-ranging arms embargo on North Korea. British energy giant BP is suing the US government...

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13 Aug

Another person who should know better has misrepresented the ICTY's specific-direction requirement: Owen Bowcott, a legal correspondent for the Guardian. Here is the sub-headline of his new article on the impact of the Perisic judgment: Legal experts say proof that accused 'specifically directed' atrocities now required after tribunal acquits Serbian commanders. And here is the first paragraph of the article: Generals and politicians...

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13 Aug

[Elizabeth Stubbins Bates is a PhD candidate in Law at SOAS, University of London.] States must disseminate international humanitarian law (IHL) as widely as possible, and integrate it into programmes of military instruction. These obligations exist in international and non-international armed conflict (with differences between treaty and customary international law for the latter) and are among the few IHL duties on...

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13 Aug

UK authorities announced that they are considering legal action against Spain to force the country to loosen border controls in Gibraltar. In response, a Spanish foreign minister said that Spain will not back down on implementing tighter controls at its border with the disputed British territory of Gibraltar, escalating the row between the two countries. U.S. hopes of landing a coveted deal worth...

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12 Aug

I want to welcome a promising new member of the international criminal law blogosphere -- Beyond the Hague. The blog is refreshingly international, as befits an ICL blog; its current contributors are Alex Fielding, Manuel Eynard, Maria Eleni Vignoli, Maria Radziejowska, Paul Bradfield, and Peter Dixon. I particularly want to single out a fantastic post by Alex Fielding on Judge Harhoff's...

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12 Aug

[Žygimantas Juška is a member of the defense team of Radovan Karadžić] One of the most high-profile cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić—provides an opportunity to propose changes for the standby counsel model. Nevertheless, the ICTY has struggled to balance the effectiveness of standby counsel and its huge financial burden on the Tribunal. The ICTY previously...

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12 Aug

India and Pakistan have exchanged more gunfire across the disputed border in Kashmir, as a 10-year ceasefire frays over accusations of killings of soldiers deployed on the frontline. Israel published a list of 26 Palestinian prisoners set to go free within days, some after spending more than two decades behind bars, in the first stage of a deal that led to a...

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11 Aug

Announcements The Goettingen Journal of International Law, Europe’s first student-run peer-reviewed journal in the field of international law, has released a special Issue on "The Law and Politics of Indigenous Peoples in International Law". The eight selected articles are available on www.gojil.eu. A completely modernized version of the journal's web page was launched in July, too. Calls for Papers The Goettingen Journal of International...

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10 Aug

This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin marvelled at Libya's flexible approach to time. He also posted NASA's visualization of the warming world since 1880, which Chris followed up on with a discussion of a recent report linking climate change to a surge in armed conflicts. In our Emerging Voices series, Gilad Noam discussed three ways of conceptualizing admissibility challenges at the ICC, and the implications for the...

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