Recent Posts

[Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK; Daragh Murray is a senior lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law and Human Rights Centre, Deputy Workstream Lead on the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, and Co-I on the Open Source Research for Rights project and Alexa Koenig is...

[Dearbhla Minogue is a Legal Officer for the Global Legal Action Network and Ruwadzano Patience Makumbe is a Zimbabwean lawyer and currently a Hillary Rodham Clinton Global Challenges Programme Scholar at Swansea University.] Digital technologies have empowered citizens to not only be consumers of information but also creators and distributors, making it possible for ordinary people to highlight human rights violations across the world. As has been the case...

[Shakuntala Banaji is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Ram Bhat is a PhD candidate in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and co-founder of Maraa, a media and arts collective in India.] In late 2018, WhatsApp awarded us one...

[Shannon Raj Singh is an attorney specialized in international criminal law and human rights; she is currently a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford's Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict and an Associate Legal Officer at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the...

[Barrie Sander is  a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil. This is the second part of a two-part post. Part one can be found here.] Rising concerns and frustrations about the role of Facebook in exacerbating tensions within conflict-affected and atrocity-afflicted communities have coincided with growing pressure for the platform to adhere to a human rights-based approach to content moderation....

[Barrie Sander is  a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil. This is the first part of a two-part post. Part two can be found here.] During a speech delivered at Georgetown earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg proudly proclaimed that “our values at Facebook are inspired by the American tradition”. What Zuckerberg failed to mention is that only a tiny fraction...

[Barrie Sander is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil and Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK.] In recent years, concerns have grown about the governance of the digital ecosystem and the social media platforms that have come to dominate it. The highly concentrated power and control of...

Call for Papers The ASIL International Criminal Law Interest Group invites proposals for its annual Works-in-Progress workshop, which will be held on 31 January 2020 at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in Cleveland, Ohio. All interested participants should submit an abstract (500 words maximum) by 15 December 2019, via email to ASIL International Criminal Law Interest Group Co-Chairs, Andrew Boyle (jandrewboyle[at]gmail[dot]com) and...

[Catalina Fernández Carter is a Chilean lawyer and holds and LLM from the University of Cambridge.] According to the latest report by the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights, 241 individuals have suffered eye injuries – several of them resulting in partial or total blindness – in the context of the social unrest the country has experienced since October. Images of people with eye patches have become a...

On 11 December 2019, Myanmar presented its case before the International Court of Justice, in the matter of provisional measures brought by The Gambia in relation to the Rohingya, under the Genocide Convention. Even though the hearings were for a specific determination – that of provisional measures – the arguments presented by Myanmar are a glimpse of the legal strategy...