It is with great sadness that I report the passing of my friend and Doughty Street colleague Sir Nigel Rodley. Cribbing from the statement issued by the International Commission of Jurists, of which Nigel was President: Elected President of the ICJ in 2012, he was serving his third term as such. He had been first elected to the Commission in 2003...
Finally, a Republican bill we can all get behind! The American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2017: A bill was introduced to the House of Representatives in early January that, among other things, calls for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. Sponsored by Senator Mike Rogers, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (aka H.R. 193) had been previously introduced by the...
My friend Lianne Boer, who recently finished her PhD at VU Amsterdam, has just published a fantastic article in the Leiden Journal of International Law entitled "'The greater part of jurisconsults’: On Consensus Claims and Their Footnotes in Legal Scholarship." Here is the abstract: This article portrays the use of consensus claims, as well as their substantiation, in the debate on cyber-attacks...
It's a bit overdue, but I want to call readers' attention to a new blog, The Law of Nations. Here is the blog's self-description: Public and private international law play an increasingly important role in the decisions of the English courts. From commercial cases to human rights claims, a huge range of public and private international law principles are now regularly...
The inestimable Ryan Goodman has a new post at Just Security listing all the times the Saudis denied using cluster munitions in Yemen. As Ryan points out, we now know that those denials were what I like to call "shameless lies" (emphasis in original): On Monday, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon told the House of Commons that following the UK’s own analysis,...
Oh for the love of God: Yes, I'm sure Gandhi would have wanted kids to enlist in a youth organization sponsored by the military of the country that colonized India, murdered tens of thousands of Indians, and adopted policies that starved millions of Indians to death....
My thanks to Adil Haque for his response to my post. Adil and I rarely disagree in any profound way about IHL, so it's enjoyable to spar with him about whether a first-strike by government forces against an organized armed group automatically creates a NIAC -- thus triggering IHL -- or whether a certain intensity of hostilities between the two is...
I have been following with great interest the debate at Just Security between Adil Haque and Jonathan Horowitz over whether the existence of a non-international conflict (NIAC) exists the moment a state launches a "first strike" at an organized armed group or whether hostilities of a certain intensity between the two are required. Adil takes the former position (see here, here, and here);...
As part of its “ICTY Legacy Dialogues” events, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”) is organising in the week of 19 June 2017 a conference on the legacy of the ICTY in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina. We invite your participation. With the ICTY’s closure scheduled for 31 December 2017, the conference aims to enable others to build on...
The inimitable David Bosco dropped quite the bombshell yesterday at FP.com: The Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC intends to open a formal investigation into the situation in Afghanistan -- a situation that includes, as the OTP discussed in its most recent preliminary-examination report, US torture of detainees between 2003 and 2005. I'll have more to say about the...
This is the first time a political ad has ever left me in tears. Enough said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4AelhV8Ws Vote. You know for whom....
Just Security published a very interesting post yesterday entitled "Military Attacks on 'Hospital Shields': The Law Itself is Partly to Blame," which seeks to explain why deliberate attacks on hospitals are becoming increasingly common -- in Syria, in Yemen, and elsewhere. The authors acknowledge that deliberate attacks on hospitals are almost always unlawful under IHL, because they violate the principle...
