Last Monday, Prof. Stephen Walt published a controversial article on his Foreign Policy blog. The title (which he did not choose and has since been changed) was regrettable: “Who Will Invade Brazil to Save the Amazon?” Written as part of the fallout from Brazil’s new (and terrible) deforestation policy, the post asks what exactly should the international community do to prevent states like Brazil from causing...
Róisín Pillay is Director of the ICJ's Europe and Central Asia Programme In the slow and sometimes frustrating business of international human rights litigation, interim measures stand out as an icon of practicality. In countless cases, they have saved lives – epitomising the principle of real and effective rather than theoretical and illusory protection of human rights. Indicated by international courts to prevent irreparable harm to...
[Sofia Poulopoulou is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University and staff member of the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on IHL.] This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict. The Second Protocol was adopted in 1999 in order to address the...
[Tasnim Motala is a fellow at Howard University School of Law, where she supervises the Civil & Human Rights Clinic.] The ICC, which left the United States reeling at the possibility of an investigation into abuses in Afghanistan, might have yet another avenue to hold the United States accountable for human rights abuses, but this time closer to home—on the US- Mexico border. Last year, the...
I am delighted to announce the publication of a new AJIL unbound symposium on the Reputation of International Organizations. Responding to Kristina Daugirdas's excellent article in the American Journal of International Law on reputation and the consequences of recent sexual exploitation and abuse problems. Contributors from law and political science assess the effect of new technologies, immunities,...
[Caleb H Wheeler is a lecturer in law at Middlesex University London and his first book, The Right To Be Present At Trial In International Criminal Law was published by Brill in 2018.] French filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier was discovered beaten to death outside her holiday let in the village of Schull, Ireland on 23 December 1996. Suspicion soon fell on Ian Bailey, a man living nearby. Following...
[Lorenzo Gasbarri is a Research Fellow in Public International Law at Bocconi University and Junior Editor of the Oxford Database on the Law of International Organizations.] One of the complex legal issues arising from the Al-Bashir case concerns the international relevance of the conduct of a member state in the context of its international organization: how to qualify the conduct of an ICC...
[Carola Lingaas is an Associate Professor of Law at VID Specialized University in Oslo (Norway). She earned her PhD in November 2017 from the University of Oslo with a thesis on ‘The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law’, which is under contract for publication by Routledge.] Introduction In November 2018, the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts in Cambodia (ECCC) rendered its judgment in the case 002/02 against the former senior...
[Dr. Tamar Megiddo is a Research Fellow at the TraffLab Research Project at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law.] To suggest in 2019 that international law scholarship remains statist may immediately lift some eyebrows. Although international law scholarship had traditionally embraced a state-centric approach, many have assumed that the field has long left statism behind. In my article Methodological Individualism, forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal, I...
Our Fifth Annual Emerging Voices Symposium starts later today. It features contributions from doctoral students and early-career academics or practitioners writing about a research project or other international law topic of interest. The Symposium will feature several posts per week and will run for the next few weeks. We hope you’ll join the conversation! ...
Reema Omer is a Legal Adviser for the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Last week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ-CIJ) delivered its much-awaited judgment in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case. As expected in a case with India and Pakistan as the contesting parties, nationalist sentiment, – as opposed to a dispassionate assessment of the verdict – motivated much of the reaction...
Rocío Quintero M. is a Legal Adviser with the Latin American Programme of the International Commission of Jurists After more than six years of negotiations, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People's Army (FARC-EP from its acronym in Spanish) reached a peace agreement in November 2016. Unlike other previous peace negotiations in Colombia, victims’ rights were a major focus of the negotiations. In...