Dear Readers: we are delighted to announce that we will be publishing Jutta Brunnée's keynote speech, entitled Challenging International Law: What's New? given at the Canadian Council on International Law's annual meeting in Ottawa on November 2, 2018. The speech will be divided into 3 posts, and comments in response will be offered by Christian Marxsen of the Max Planck Institute,...
[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD cand. (Intl Law) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Fellow of the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation.] The purpose of the present post is to briefly discuss certain arguments, based on the 1953 London Agreement and the 1990 Two-Plus-Four Treaty, asserted by Germany on different occasions aiming at the dismissal of the legal validity...
[Beatrice Lindstrom is the Legal Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti and was counsel to plaintiffs in the Haiti cholera litigation Georges v. United Nations.] Last week’s Supreme Court argument in Jam v. International Finance Corporation addressed whether international organizations’ immunity under the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA) has evolved with foreign sovereign immunity over the last...
[Eugénie Mérieau is a legal consultant for the International Commission of Jurists.] In September 2018, the Indian Supreme Court invalidated, in two landmark rulings, misogynistic and homophobic laws inherited from the British Empire. On September 27, it struck down Section 497 of the Penal Code (Shine v. Union of India) criminalizing adultery, three weeks after it had annulled Art. 377 of...
As evidenced in Part I, Latin American states have not been keen to allow expansive interpretations of the rules for use force in foreign soil. Latin America is a region historically subjected to foreign intervention, and as such, the rules it designed, especially in the pre-Charter era, were always very much thought out from a perspective of protecting “the invaded”,...
[Vivek Divan is an Indian lawyer and longtime queer activist.] I have recoiled from writing about this, but do so given that it may resonate with the constituency that the International Commission of Jurists engages with. Those who know me are well aware that I don’t like to namedrop. Yet, I did at a meeting of the ICJ in New Delhi...
Ever since its very first articulations, the “unwilling or unable test” has relied heavily in the time-tested legitimacy of the 1837 Caroline Affair, where British forces sunk a vessel manned by Canadian rebels in American territory. Dressing such a visible and well-known case in the cloth of “unwilling or unable” allows its proponents to argue that its underlying principles have...
[Kunal Ambasta is an Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University.] “Can a right to privacy be read into the Indian Constitution and deployed to protect homosexual sexual acts?” This is one of the questions posed right at the start of the AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) Report on homosexuality in India published in 1991. In 2018, the...
[Siddharth Narrain is a lawyer and legal researcher based in Delhi.] Earlier this year, a five-judge Constitutional Bench of the Indian Supreme Court, in a path-breaking judgment in Navtej Singh Johar declared the colonial sodomy statute (Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) unconstitutional, and no longer applicable to consenting sexual acts between adults, effectively decriminalizing homosexuality, and legally recognizing LGBTI...
[Renata Nagamine is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.] On October 28th, 2018, Brazilians chose their president for the next 4 years. The running candidates were Universidade de São Paulo Professor Fernando Haddad and Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a congressman in his 7th mandate who emerged as a prominent extreme-right figure during the impeachment of former President Dilma...
[Massimo Frigo is a Senior International Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists.] 2018 continues to be a year marked by fierce disputes with regard to asylum, including what it is and what the obligations States have towards refugees or others entitled to international protection. More recently, Venezuela has been another example of the fact that a refugee crisis may...
[Frédéric Mégret is an Associate Professor of Law at McGill University Faculty of Law.] On the 26th September, a group of diligent Haitian lawyers headed by human rights defender Patrice Florvilus requested an emergency injunction (“en référé”) before the Tribunal de Première Instance de Port-au-Prince against the State of Haiti, that would compel it to trigger the creation of the...