I greatly appreciate Evelyn Ankumah (Africa Legal Aid) and James Goldston (OSJI) taking the time to respond to my post about the upcoming election for ICC Prosecutor. Unfortunately, their post barely addresses any of the concerns I raised about the process the Committee used to shortlist four candidates. Instead, it simply reiterates the view put forth in the Joint Civil...
[Evelyn Ankumah is the Executive Director of Africa Legal Aid (AFLA). James Goldston is the Executive Director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.] Next Thursday and Friday mark an important step in the process to elect a new ICC prosecutor. After six months of hard work by the Committee for the Election of the Prosecutor (CEP) and amidst growing curiosity, states and civil society...
My friend Craig Martin has started a new international-law podcast entitled "JIB/JAB: The Law of War Podcast." Here is his description: This is a podcast about the various legal regimes that govern the use of force and armed conflict – primarily the jus ad bellum regime, which governs when states may lawfully resort to force, and the jus in bello regime (also known as international...
[Kiran Mohan Vazhapully is Legal Officer at the Secretariat of Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO), New Delhi. Currently, he is on leave specializing in air and space law at McGill University, where he is an Erin J.C. Arsenault Fellow.] Last month, based on a Reuters report, Chris Borgen wrote in this blog about the White House chalking out details of a...
[Deepak Raju is a senior associate at Sidley Austin LLP, Geneva. The views expressed in this article are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sidley Austin LLP and its partners.] The “non-incidental” consequence of “incidental” jurisdiction: Where the tail wags the dog On the merits of the dispute, the parties disagreed on whether India had violated...
[Deepak Raju is a senior associate at Sidley Austin LLP, Geneva. The views expressed in this article are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sidley Austin LLP and its partners.] An arbitral tribunal established under Annex VII to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”), in the Enrica Lexie dispute between...
The United Nations Team of Experts on the Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict (the Team of Experts) and the Journal of International Criminal Justice (the Journal) have launched a Special Issue on the progress and challenges in advancing accountability for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) through national judicial institutions. It has been a bit over a decade since...
In response to rumblings that states are less than overwhelmed by the four candidates the Committee on the Election of the Prosecutor has selected, civil society organizations are mounting a concerted effort to dissuade states from considering new candidates. The best example is a recent "Joint Civil Society Statement" signed by nine leading human-rights organizations, including Open Society Justice Institute,...
Book Launch Event on 23 July 2020 Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (Cambridge University Press 2020), co-sponsored by the American Society of International Law International Criminal Law Interest Group and the American Branch of the International Law Association United Nations Committee. Join leading experts in the field discuss Professor Jennifer Trahan's new book, which...
[Verity Robson is the Legal Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of the United Kingdom to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Geneva. A longer version of this article first appeared in the Journal for Conflict and Security Law, Volume 25 Issue 1.] With last month’s publication online of the ICRC’s impressive new Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention, it’s worth revisiting initial reactions to the volumes...
[Tamsin Phillipa Paige is a Lecturer with Deakin Law School and consults for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in relation to Maritime Crime.] [Recently Opinio Juris hosted a symposium on Professor Monica Hakimi’s latest article in the Michigan Law Review, “Making Sense of Customary International Law”, and her argument that the rulebook approach isn’t reflective of how CIL functions, and...
And so it begins. According to a leading Kenyan paper, Kenya has rejected the four candidates identified by the ICC's Committee on the Election of the Prosecutor: "Kenya anticipated that the Committee would present a shortlist of qualified candidates with an equal chance of being elected. The current shortlist does not meet this expectation and appears skewed in favour of a...