[Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School.] ‘it is the position of the State Party that, the acts complained of have neither the required level of intensity or cruelty nor the impermissible purpose to permit them to be defined as torture. Further, the acts complained of do not meet the standard so as to fall within...
[Máiréad Enright is Professor of Feminist Legal Studies at Birmingham Law School.] On October 31 2022, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) published its decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland. Mrs. Coppin is 73 years old and spent her early life in State-funded, religious-run carceral institutions. She was born in a county home to a teenage single mother. Aged two, she...
Jennifer Trahan has a new post at Just Security entitled "Why a 'Hybrid' Ukrainian Tribunal on the Crime of Aggression Is Not the Answer." There are many problems with Trahan's post, but in this response I want to focus specifically on the most glaring one: namely, her claim that a hybrid tribunal would need to apply Ukraine's domestic crime of...
Support has been growing in recent weeks for creating a hybrid tribunal to address Russia's criminal act of aggression against Ukraine instead of an ad hoc Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression (STCoA). The German Minister of Foreign Affairs has endorsed a hybrid tribunal over an STCoA, as has the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary. Even the US War Crimes...
[Rana Moustafa Essawy is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Alexandria University (Egypt).] On the 14 November 2022, the UN General Assembly (GA) adopted draft resolution A/ES-11/L.6 on ‘Furtherance of Remedy and Reparation for Aggression against Ukraine’. This resolution Recognizes ...
[John D. Haskell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester Law School and Junior Faculty at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy.] “I [find] myself in a spiral of uneasiness … [S]omething in the authors’ tone of voice, in their self-positioning [is] disturbing… I am troubled by the initial pairing of the notions of democratic...
[Kudakwashe Mapako holds an LLB Degree in International Law (Cum Laude) from Zhejiang Gongshang University and Prospective Masters Candidate at University of Cape town specializing in international law. He is a Research Officer at African Center for Science and International Security (AFRICSIS) in the Arms Control and Nonproliferation program.] Introduction Humanity's wars have seen a slew of instances in which installations containing dangerous...
[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. His new book: The Democratisation of the European Union will be published in January 2023 by The Hague Eleven.] Seventy years after the start of the process of European integration, the EU is still being portrayed by politicians and academics alike as an ‘unsolvable conundrum’. Despite strenuous efforts, theorists have...
[Sandra Cossart is the Executive Director of the French NGO Sherpa which fights new forms of impunity linked to globalization. Anna Kiefer is Advocacy and Litigation Officer at Sherpa. Cannelle Lavite is Co-Director of the Business and Human Rights program at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). Claire Tixeire is a Senior Legal Advisor at the ECCHR.] “Knowingly paying several million dollars to an...
Astrid Coracini and Jennifer Trahan have a new post at Just Security that argues a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression created either by treaty or by a General Assembly-endorsed agreement between Ukraine and the UN would not have to recognise the personal immunity of Russian officials. I disagree, for reasons I have explained in a recent article in...
[Professor Shane Darcy is the Deputy Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights in the School of Law at the University of Galway and the author of ‘To Serve the Enemy: Informers, Collaborators and the Laws of Armed Conflict’ (Oxford University Press).] Every war has its collaborators. And every country at war must at some point not only come to...
[Dr Erica Moret is Policy Director at the Swiss Centre for Policy Engagement, Polisync; Senior Researcher at the Centre for Global Governance at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and Senior Fellow on Sanctions and Humanitarian Affairs at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR). She provided input to the 2022 Kyiv Security Compact on the role sanctions could play in...