Recent Posts

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...

Kevin kicked off the week with a post about Jean-Pierre Bemba’s claim against the ICC for €70 million following his final acquittal. While Kevin was skeptical about the merits of Bemba’s compensation claim for €22 million based on his decade of wrongful detention, Kevin was more optimistic about the success Bemba’s spoliation claim for €42.4 million resulting from the ICC’s...

Call for Papers The University of London is pleased to announce a workshop on "Rectifying the Protection Gap for 'Climate Refugees': What's Next?" on 6 June 2019. This workshop aims to assess the outcomes of the UN Global Compacts and Task Force, to identify their contributions to ongoing attempts to construct better protection mechanisms for those forced to move as...

[Steven Kay QC is Head of Chambers at 9 Bedford Row. He has appeared as leading counsel in many significant international criminal trials (Tadić, Milošević, Musema, Gotovina, Kenyatta) and Joshua Kern is a Barrister at 9 Bedford Row. He has defended clients at the ICC (Kenyatta), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) (Ieng Sary), and the International Criminal...

The Philippines' withdrawal from the ICC becomes effective this Saturday, March 17. There are domestic legal proceedings underway that have the potential to nullify the withdrawal. But if the withdrawal goes forward, we are faced with an important question: what happens to the OTP's preliminary examination? This is, of course, Burundi redux. In that case, the OTP preserved its ability to...

Jean-Pierre Bemba, recently finally acquitted by the Appeals Chamber, dropped quite the legal bombshell last night on the ICC: he is demanding nearly €70,000,000 from the Court -- €22,000,000 in compensation for the 10 years he spent in detention; €4,000,000 in legal fees; and €42,400,000 for the economic loss he has suffered as a result of the Court's mismanagement of property it...

Dhruv Sharma and Utkarsh Srivastava kicked off the week with an analysis of India’s legal justification of “non-military preemptive action” for the Balakot airstrikes, which included a robust discussion on the law of self-defense. Livio Zilli, a Senior Legal Adviser and UN Representative at the International Commission of Jurists, provided a detailed analysis of the UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment...