Recent Posts

[Abhijeet Shrivastava and Rudraksh Lakra are fourth-year law students at Jindal Global Law School, India.] Introduction Every once in a while, one or another international tribunal is faced with the resurgence of a question that should long have been regarded as settled: is there a doctrine of ‘unclean hands’ that exists in the form of a ‘general principle of law’ - in...

[Ana Luquerna is a lawyer working at The International Court of Justice as a Judicial Fellow. The opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author.] The Current Situation In less than two months, the world has been turned upside down due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a mere fifty-seven days, more than 5.1 million refugees, around 11% of the population, have fled...

[Walter Kemp is Director of the Global Strategy against Transnational Organized Crime at the Global Initiative against Organized Crime, a former Senior Adviser at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and former Vice President of the International Peace Institute. He also teaches at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. He is author of Security through Cooperation: To the Same...

[Dr Ka Lok Yip is an Assistant Professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University.] Events vs Tendencies: an Interdisciplinary Divide? In view of the gravity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is understandable that most legal commentators focus on the legal norms regulating the event directly, jus contra bellum, rather than other legal norms regulating the tendencies that make up the more...

[Tobias Vestner is Head of the Research and Policy Advice Department at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), Fellow at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), Non-Resident Fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Juliette François-Blouin is a Programme Officer with the Security and Law Programme...

A little-known aspect of the war in Ukraine is that both Russia and Ukraine have deployed weapons that are capable of being used fully autonomously: for Russia, Lancet drones; for Ukraine, Punisher drones. Both weapons are capable of being operated semi-autonomously, and it is not clear whether Russia or Ukraine has used them in their fully autonomous mode. But the...

[Douglas Irvin-Erickson is Assistant Professor at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University, where he directs the Raphaël Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program.] Dictator, assassin, war criminal. Russian President Vladimir Putin may soon add genocidaire to his resume.  A long line of blood runs from Chechnya, through Syria and Georgia, to Ukraine. Since 2014, in Ukraine, Russian forces have committed war crimes...

Call for Papers Call for Papers - ASCOMARE Yearbook on the Law of the Sea (Volume 2): Associazione di Consulenza in Diritto del Mare (ASCOMARE) is pleased to announce a call for papers for Volume 2 ("Fisheries and the Law of the Sea in the Anthropocene Era") of the ASCOMARE Yearbook on the Law of the Sea (YLoS). Building on the...

[Dr Justine Bendel is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.] [This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101028622.] This post will look at the recent decision delivered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding the case entitled Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the...

[Dr. Smadar Ben-Natan is an Israeli and international lawyer, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studies the intersection of international law, human rights, and criminal justice in Israel/Palestine, and has published on Israeli military courts, POW status, torture, and extraterritorial human rights.] [A previous version of this commentary was published in Hebrew by the Forum for Regional Thinking,...

[Sandra Wisner is a senior staff lawyer with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), a U.S. human rights organization, working in partnership with the Haiti-based public interest law firm the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI). Kristina Fried is a lawyer and Bertha Justice fellow with IJDH.] At first glance, the garment workers’ protests sweeping Haiti appear to be the result of a grossly inadequate...