Well, that was predictable. The Ntaganda defence has filed two motions relating to the news that the ICC's judges have permitted Judge Ozaki to simultaneously serve as a judge in the case and as Japan's ambassador to Estonia. The first, directed to the Presidency, is styled "Request for Disclosure Concerning the Decision of the Plenary of Judges on the Judicial Independence...
This is truly scandalous -- even by the ICC's standards. Thomas Verfuss explains: The Hague Judge Kuniko Ozaki wants to leave her position as a full-time judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to become the ambassador of Japan in Estonia in April. Her departure from fulltime engagement at the ICC comes before she and two of her colleagues...
[Kruthi Venkatesh is a lawyer practising in Mumbai, India.] In recent years, there has been a lot of debate on investor accountability for human rights abuses, especially in relation to cross-border trade and investment agreements. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UN Guiding Principles”) has been a guiding force for this discourse. With increase in foreign investments in...
[Mark Ellis is Executive Director of the International Bar Association, London.] On March 24, 2016, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”) convicted Radovan Karadžić of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war. Almost exactly three years later, on March 20, 2019, the Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals...
Luke Moffett is a senior law lecturer at Queen's University Belfast and Principal Investigator on the "Reparations, Responsibility and Victimhood in Transitional Societies” project. Following the award of the Nobel Peace prize to Dr Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad in December 2018, there is a substantial effort to capitalise on the publicity by pressing for an ‘International Reparation Initiative’ for victims of...
[Emma Irving is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Law, Leiden University and Nicholas Ortiz is a Research and Teaching Associate at the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on International Humanitarian Law.] On 18 March 2019, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (‘CoI’) published its detailed findings of its...
Last week, the excellent lawyers at The Guernica Group, led by my friend Toby Cadman, filed an Article 15 communication with the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) arguing that the ICC should open an investigation into the deportation of civilians from Syria to Jordan. The communication itself is not public, so what we know of TGG's legal argument comes from their...
Jennifer Trahan and Megan Fairlie kicked off the week with an analysis of the US’s latest attack on the International Criminal Court, in which they highlighted the doctrinal and practical problems associated with US’s threat to implement, inter alia, a travel ban on ICC officials investigating mass atrocity crimes which allegedly occurred in Afghanistan. Kevin continued with an historical analysis of...
Call for Papers In Resolution 1888 (2009), the United Nations Security Council urged Member States to investigate and prosecute conflict-related sexual violence and established the UN Team of Experts on Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict (Team of Experts) to assist national authorities in this regard. To commemorate the tenth-year anniversary of its establishment, the Team of Experts...
[Mark Drumbl is Professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law. His research and teaching interests include public international law, global environmental governance, international criminal law, post-conflict justice, and transnational legal process. This contribution was originally posted at legalsightseeing.org. ] International judges get so very few monuments in their honor. One such judge, however, has two. This judge is Radhabinod Pal, from India....
In a recent post at EJIL: Talk! on the India/Pakistan crisis, Mary Ellen O'Connell references a book chapter in which she suggests that Israel's 1976 raid on Entebbe was the first situation in which a state invoked the "unwilling or unable" doctrine as a jus ad bellum justification for self-defense: Christian Tams, Dire Tladi, and I will soon publish, Self-Defence Against Non-State...
[Jennifer Trahan is a Clinical Professor at the NYU Center for Global Affairs and Megan Fairlie is a Professor of Law at Florida International University School of Law.] On March 15, 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo announced plans to implement a travel ban against International Criminal Court (“ICC”) officials working on the Afghanistan situation. The ban specifically will revoke visas...