In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

05 Sep

[Ralph Mamiya is team leader for the Protection of Civilians Team in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations but writes here in a purely personal capacity, and the views expressed do not represent official positions of his Department or the United Nations.] The protection of civilians is both a well-established topic in international law and also a relatively new and controversial...

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05 Sep

This week, we are hosting a symposium on the Protection of Civilians, a volume recently published by Oxford University Press, edited by Haidi Willmot, United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Ralph Mamiya, team leader, Protections of Civilians at the United Nations' Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Scott Sheeran, Senior Lecturer, Director of the LLMs and MAs in International Human Rights, School of Law and Human Rights...

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05 Sep

The summer is coming to a close and so is our fourth annual Emerging Voices Symposium. We have featured fantastic posts from emerging scholars, practitioners and students over the course of the summer and a roundup follows of what it is that they have covered. Alexandra Hofer started our 2016 edition off with her post on assessing the role of the European Union...

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05 Sep

[Grazyna Baranowska is a Senior Researcher at the Poznań Human Rights Centre of the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.] The nature of enforced disappearances is that it affects whole families, rather than only the individuals who disappeared. While the majority of the forcibly disappeared are men, these disappearances have a strong economic, socials and psychological effects on the...

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04 Sep

Event The Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa is hosting a "Young Researchers Workshop on Terrorism and Belligerency" between September 7-19. Though this event is by invitation only, you can contact the organizer at bmichel@geo.haifa.ac.il; additionally, information about the streaming of the event can be found on the Minerva RLEC YouTube channel...

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29 Aug

I have admired Mark Tushnet's work since I was a law student, so I was very disappointed to read his critique of the now-notorious letter the University of Chicago sent to first-year students about "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings." Here is the bit that got Tushnet so riled up: Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called...

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29 Aug

[Amina Adanan is a PhD candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, NUI Galway.]  In common law and civil law legal systems it is the responsibility of the public prosecutor to determine whether the prosecution of an international crime is pursued. The level of this discretionary power and the considerations to be taken into account in making the...

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29 Aug

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Nigeria would let Boko Haram choose a non-profit organization as an intermediary in any talks on the release of about 200 schoolgirls kidnapped from the northeastern village of Chibok in 2014, President Muhammadu Buhari said on Sunday. A landmine planted by Islamist group Boko Haram...

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29 Aug

Buzzfeed's Chris Hamby is out today with the first installment of a promised four-part investigative report into the system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS).  Like all such reports, it needs a spectacular headline and summary to draw clicks, and this one's a doozy: The Court That Rules the World A parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to everyone...

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23 Aug

Defense One points to a news story in the Baghdad Post that the Iraqi Security Forces may be preparing to deploy a ground-combat robot: Loosely dubbed Alrobot — Arabic for robot — it has four cameras, an automatic machine gun, and a launcher for Russian-made Katyusha rockets, and can be operated by laptop and radio link from a kilometer away, the...

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22 Aug

As regular readers know, although I'm opposed to academic BDS, I fully support its economic incarnation. Which is why I find stories like this both depressing and infuriating: “I have no problem with Jewish people or any other religion or different beliefs. But for personal reasons, you can’t ask me to shake the hand of anyone from this state, especially in front...

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22 Aug

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa A military court in the Democratic Republic of Congo has begun the trial of 215 members of an armed group accused of killing hundreds of civilians in and around Beni town in the country’s northeast. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and counterparts from eight...

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