In association with the International Commission of Jurists

October 2017

31 Oct

[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Professor, The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS, and Chair of the International Criminal Court Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association.] On Friday, October 27, Burundi’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, filed one year earlier, became effective. This sad event —the first ever withdrawal from the Court to become effective —...

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29 Oct

As has been widely reported, Burundi has just become the first state to formally withdraw from the ICC. The OTP has been examining the situation in Burundi since April 2016, but it did not formally ask the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) to authorize an investigation prior to Burundi's withdrawal becoming effective. So what does Burundi's withdrawal mean for the OTP's preliminary...

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29 Oct

International law is famously mushy and subject to a variety of interpretations.  But there are some issues upon which there is more consensus under international law, such as the illegality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  But is there any reasonable argument favoring the legality of the Catalan Parliament’s recent declaration of independence from Spain?  I don’t think so. At the outset,...

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25 Oct

I have just posted on SSRN a draft of a (very) long article entitled "Specially-Affected States and the Formation of Custom." It represents my first real foray into both "classic" public international law and postcolonial critique. Here is the abstract: Although the US has consistently relied on the ICJ’s doctrine of specially-affected states to claim that it and other powerful states...

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22 Oct

Announcement ASIL presents "International Law and the Trump Administration: The Use of Force under International Law" Online, Monday, October 30 at 2:00 PM ET. This live online briefing, the eighth in the American Society of International Law's series on "International Law and the Trump Administration," will feature former senior U.S. officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations who were responsible for formulating...

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17 Oct

[Malcolm Jorgensen is a Research Fellow at the Berlin Potsdam Research Group "International Law--Rise or Decline?"] In their new book The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro assert that Chinese occupation of maritime features in the South China Sea is “worth little as long as the rest of the world refuses...

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08 Oct

Call for Papers The Military Law and the Law of War Review / Revue de Droit Militaire et de Droit de la Guerre is a journal specialised in matters of interest for both civilian and military legal advisors as well as legal scholars and academics. Published since 1962, it is among the oldest publications at the international level in the...

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06 Oct

I am pleased to announce an upcoming experts workshop on UN Accountability on October 19 at Seton Hall Law School. This workshop will explore the liability of International Organizations for international wrongs, as well address direct, indirect or shared responsibility. It will offer a detailed examination of accountability, and what models of external and internal international dispute resolution currently exist, and...

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02 Oct

I have just started watching Star Trek: Discovery, the first new Star Trek series in a decade. It's excellent -- dark, well-acted, with beautiful special affects. But I have to say that it was shocking to see the Captain of a Federation starship engage in a blatantly perfidious act in the second episode. The Federation has just come out on...

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02 Oct

[Astrid Reisinger Coracini is is Lecturer at the University of Salzburg and Director of the Salzburg Law School on International Criminal Law, Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Law (SLS). This is the second of a two-part post on the subject. The first can be found here.]  1. Does the non-application of Art. 121(5) second sentence violate the law of treaties? Article 40(4) of...

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