Last week I argued that the OTP's failure to ask the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize an investigation prior to Burundi's withdrawal from the ICC becoming effective -- 28 October 2017 -- meant that the Court no longer had jurisdiction over crimes committed on Burundi's territory prior to that date. I still think my legal analysis is correct, but my factual...
[Jeffrey Biller, Lt Col, USAF, is the Associate Director for the Law of Air, Space and Cyber Operations at the Stockton Center for the Study of International Law, US Naval War College.] This May, the law of naval warfare took a significant step forward with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) release of an updated commentary on the Second...
[Xuechan Ma, PhD candidate at Grotius Center for International Legal Studies of Leiden University, the Netherlands, researching on the topic of international cooperation in disputed marine areas; L.L.M. & L.L.B. at Peking University, China. Email: maxuechan@gmail.com.] The Special Chamber of the ITLOS delivered its judgement of the Ghana v. Côte d'Ivoire case on 23 September 2017, which pertained to unilateral oil...
[Sergey Vasiliev is an Assistant Professor of International Law, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. This is the second part of a two-part contribution. The first part can be found here.] Initiation of an investigation by the OTP post-withdrawal As I argued previously, no investigation in the Situation in Burundi can be initiated after 27 October 2017 unless the OTP made...
[Sergey Vasiliev is an Assistant Professor of International Law, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. This is the first part of a two-part contribution.] Questions raised by the ICC’s reaction to Burundi’s withdrawal On 27 October 2017, one year after Burundi notified the UN Secretary-General of its intention to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the withdrawal became effective in...
[Jennifer Trahan is an Associate Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.] The ICC Prosecutor announced last week that she was requesting the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize the Afghanistan Preliminary Examination moving into the Investigation stage. This would take the ICC’s Afghanistan investigation one step closer to resulting in actual cases. We have known for quite...
Very significant news out of the ICC today: after a decade-long preliminary examination, the OTP has finally decided to ask the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize a formal investigation into the situation in Afghanistan. Here is a snippet from Fatou Bensouda's announcement: For decades, the people of Afghanistan have endured the scourge of armed conflict. Following a meticulous preliminary examination of the...
