Recent Posts

[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...

[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...

[Karolína Babická is a legal adviser with the International Commission of Jurists.] The EU, in a historical move, has for the first time decided to activate the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD), immediately after the Russian aggression in Ukraine started on 24 February.  By 2 March there was already a proposal by the European Commission to activate the Directive, and on 4 March, the...

[Francisco Lobo is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and a Legal Theory and International Criminal Law lecturer. He holds an LLM in International Legal Studies (NYU), an LLM in International Law, and an LLB (University of Chile).] During the past weeks a flurry of legal opinions concerning Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine has flooded...

[Nurlan Mustafayev is a counsel on international legal affairs at the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan, an instructor on public international law, and a pro bono advisor to Azerbaijani refugees on claims before the European Court of Human Rights.] Introduction  Unlike Russia’s ongoing direct invasion of Ukraine, many cases of military invasions were a mixture of direct and indirect or...

Introduction  The 1988 political prisoner massacre (the massacre, the 1988 massacre) in Iran occurred almost 35 years ago. Yet its relevance remains visible in contemporary debates on Iran’s human rights record, the legitimacy of the government, and the human rights credentials of its leaders. Most importantly, it remains an unresolved issue worthy of investigative and judicial attention for the victims, survivors,...

[Dr Tomas Hamilton (@tomhamilton) is a Researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Managing Editor of the VICI-funded project 'Rethinking the Outer Limits of Secondary Liability for International Crimes and Serious Human Rights Violations'.] China’s Obligations Under Article 7 of the ATT Not to Transfer Arms to Russia In the event that assistance does not fall into the above mandatory prohibitions of Article 6, for instance if Russia provides...