As I've noted before, the jurisdictional regime at the ICC for aggression is exceedingly narrow. In essence, the Court will have jurisdiction over an act of aggression only in the following situation: 1. The aggressor is a member of the Court, has ratified the aggression amendments, and has not opted out of the Court's jurisdiction. 2. The victim is a member of...
The Appeals Chamber (AC) has decided to conditionally release Gbagbo and Blé Goudé pending its resolution of the OTPs appeal. Gbagbo has already been released, with Belgium agreeing to the AC's conditions. No word on which state, if any, will agree to take Blé Goudé. I'm glad the AC rejected the OTP's argument that Gbagbo and Blé Goudé should remain in detention. But...
It's been a while since I've welcomed a new participant in the blogosphere -- a sign that that the "market" for new blogs in international law is slowing down. But here is a happy exception, courtesy of James Gathii, one of the editors (the other two are Olabisi D. Akinkugbe and Nthope Mapefane): I am pleased to announce the launch today of AfronomicsLaw, a...
Once more into the breach, dear friends. Judge Ibañez Carranza has now responded to the Joint Declaration issued by Judge Eboe-Osuji as President of the Court and Judge Hofmański as the President of the Appeals Division. Short version: she's not happy about the Joint Declaration. Three specific points are worth mentioning. First (para. 2), Judge Ibañez Carranza argues that Judge Eboe-Osuji and Judge...
It's not yet available on the ICC website, but Judge Eboe-Osuji (the President of the Court) and Judge Hofmański (the President of the Appeals Division) have released a short Joint Declaration defending Judge Eboe-Osuji's appointment as the Presiding Judge in the Gbagbo No Case to Answer appeal. The Declaration does not explain his appointment, which seems to confirm Judge Ibañez Carranza's...
Another day, another slow-motion fiasco at the ICC. Today's episode: Judge Luz del Carmen Ibañez Carranza has dissented from a decision to assign a presiding judge to an appeal. The appeal in question involves the Gbagbo No Case to Answer decision, about which I blogged extensively yesterday. The President of the Appeals Division appointed Judge Eboe-Osuji, even though he is already the...
I highly recommend Paul Bradfield's erudite post yesterday, in which he suggests that "the Gbagbo Trial Chamber appears to have departed from the standard enunciated in Ruto" concerning the standard of proof applicable to No Case to Answer (NCA) motions. I do not completely agree -- and I want to offer a couple of thoughts on Paul's post, with the caveat that we...
In a recent article published in AJIL, I tried to develop a coherent theory of the doctrine of specially-affected states, first articulated by the ICJ -- and largely ignored thereafter -- in North Sea Continental Shelf. I concluded the article with a call to the Global South to invoke the doctrine more liberally in international litigation: This article, then, is not...
I'd normally leave this for the announcements post, but the Harvard International Law Journal has been extremely kind to me -- not only publishing two of my articles, but also organizing online symposiums for each of them. So the least I could do is put in a kind word for the Journal's ambitious new plans for its online component: The Harvard...
I wasn't feeling particularly well on my recent long flight from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam, so I took advantage of my sickness to binge watch all eight episodes of BBC2's international criminal justice drama, Black Earth Rising, which focuses on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I wasn't expecting much, because BER was billed as a drama about the ICC. But I was...
On Wednesday, a court in the UAE sentenced a PhD student at Durham University, Matthew Hedges, to life imprisonment for supposedly "spying" for the British government. There is no evidence to support the spying allegation, and both Hedges and the British government vociferously deny it. By all accounts, Hedges was simply in the UAE to research the country's foreign and...
To celebrate the launch of our new website and new members, Opinio Juris will be holding a symposium over the next two weeks on Harold Hongju Koh's new book, The Trump Administration and International Law, which was just published by Oxford University Press. (You can get a 20% discount by clicking on the OUP advertisement to the right of this...