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[Ekaterina Aristova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford and Carlos Lopez is a Senior Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists.] The much-awaited judgment by the UK Supreme Court (SC) in Okpabi and others v Royal Dutch Shell Plc and another (Okpabi) was handed down in an online hearing on Friday 12 February 2021 some five years...

Call for Papers International Criminal Justice: A Counter-Hegemonic Project: The Berlin University Alliance is pleased to announce a call for papers for "International Criminal Justice: A Counter-Hegemonic Project?" International criminal law, since its origins, has been mired in controversies and critique inter alia on account of its understanding as victor’s justice as well as its colonial legacy. Some states have challenged...

[Qetevan Qistauri is research assistant at the Regensburg University (Germany) with the main focus on International Human Rights Law.] ECtHR, Grand Chamber, Georgia v. Russia (II), No. 38263/08 Thursday 21 January 2021, the ECtHR decided on the interstate case under Article 33 ECHR Georgia v. Russia (II) in relation to the war in 2008, which had been dealt with by the Grand Chamber for several years. Although this...

[Victoria Priori is a PhD student in International Law at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.] The case R v Reeves Taylor before the UK Supreme Court brought to the forefront the issue of whether the infliction of serious mental or physical suffering by members of non-state armed groups amounts to torture, as defined in section 134 of the UK Criminal Justice Act (CJA) implementing the definition of the...

[Andrew Forde  just passed his PhD viva at the Irish Centre for Human Rights focussed on The Application of the ECHR in Contested European Territories, with extensive professional experience in post-conflict regions in south eastern Europe and the south Caucasus principally with the Council of Europe.] Throughout the brutal six-week war in and around Nagorno-Karabakh which began on 27 September 2020, the former Human Rights Ombudsman of...

[Shashiskala Gurpur is the Director of Symbiosis Law School and Dean, Faculty of Law, Symbiosis International (Deemed) University. Aakarsh Banyal is a student of law at Symbiosis Law School, Pune, India.] Introduction Facebook CEO’s apology over the company’s failure to remove posts which incited widespread violence in Myanmar stands testament to the possibility of mass violence being perpetuated through the use of technology. Such instances...

[Quazi Omar Foysal is a Lecturer in Law at American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB).] Introduction The atrocity crimes allegedly committed against Rohingyas in Myanmar have attracted unprecedented efforts to ensure justice and accountability at international and domestic levels. These efforts include but not limited to International Criminal Court (ICC), International Court of Justice (ICJ), two UN Human Rights Council bodies, an Argentine universal jurisdiction case, and several so-called military trials in Myanmar. Very...

The news from Myanmar since 1 February 2021 has been stark – the Myanmar military or the “Tatmadaw” has detained politicians and activists including Aung San Suu Kyi, declared a year-long state of emergency in which the senior general and head of the army, Min Aung Hlaing is essentially in charge of the country. There are reports coming in of force being used against...

[Coline Schupfer is an Associate Policy Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative. You can find Coline on Twitter @colineschupfer. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent the position of any organisation.] The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized...

[Sabina Garahan is a doctoral candidate at the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex.]  The announcement of a peace deal in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on the night of 9-10 November 2020 marked the end of 28 years of hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Although, in 1993, the UN Security Council had adopted four resolutions demanding the immediate withdrawal of all occupying Armenian forces from all occupied territories...

Few things bother me more than journalists who seemingly cannot be bothered to accurately describe what the ICC does. Here is what Isabel Kershner, a Jerusalem correspondent for the New York Times, wrote about the Pre-Trial Chamber's recent decision that the Court has jurisdiction over the situation in Palestine (my emphasis): Dealing a severe diplomatic blow to Israel, the court ruled...

[Liana Georgieva Minkova recently defended her PhD at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, UK, and holds a full award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Training Partnership.] The Ongwen trial judgment was delivered on February 4th at the International Criminal Court (ICC), setting a number of important precedents for the Court: the first conviction resulting from the investigation in Northern...