Note: although I serve as Special Adviser to the ICC Prosecutor on War Crimes, I was not involved in the Al Hassan case. The Trial Chamber released its 822-page (!) judgment in the Al Hassan case yesterday. Al Hassan was convicted of a number of serious crimes, including the crime against humanity of torture and the war crimes of torture and...
[Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is a Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at the University of Edinburgh] On 28 May 2024 Norway, Spain and Ireland jointly recognised Palestine’s statehood. Slovenia and Armenia followed suit on 5 and 21 June respectively and Belgium and Malta and even the UK’s Labour Party, at the time of writing, are considering similar steps. Given that as Prime...
[Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK and Principal Investigator of the TRUE project. Stephen Sharp Queener is an associate of the Law program at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, a Masters Student in Public Policy at Stanford University, and a current Fulbright Student Scholar in Germany. Basile Simon is...
[William Worster has taught public international law, the law of international organizations and international migration and refugee law at The Hague University of Applied Sciences for more than fifteen years] This is the second part of a post analyzing the US State Department Report on assurances it has received that exported arms will not be misused. In the first part, this...
[William Worster has taught public international law, the law of international organizations and international migration and refugee law at The Hague University of Applied Sciences for more than fifteen years] After a short delay, the US State Department delivered its first report to Congress under National Security Memorandum 20 (“NSM-20”) providing its analysis of assurances that exported arms will not be...
[Luciana Maulida holds an LLM (Environmental Law) from Melbourne Law School and is an incoming PhD student at King's College London, focusing on the intersection of international law and climate change] The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS or the Tribunal) issued a landmark unanimous Advisory Opinion (the Opinion) on climate change, on 21 May 2024. The Opinion addressed states' obligations under...
[Mohamed Eltawila is a judge at Egypt’s Court of Cassation’s Technical Bureau, and a former prosecutor and visiting professional at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He holds a master’s degree in international law from the Geneva Graduate Institute.] The intersection of national statutes like the American Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) of 1991 and the overarching...
[Fred Abrahams covered the Kosovo conflict for Human Rights Watch. He wrote the book Modern Albania and co-wrote A Village Destroyed: War Crimes in Kosovo. Marija Ristic covered Serbian war crimes trials as a journalist for local and international media.] This April, a modest courtroom in Belgrade, Serbia, offered a lens into the global debate on justice for atrocity crimes. The case dealt...
[Isabelle Hassfurther is a legal advisor in the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). The ECCHR submitted a statement on the draft bill and participated in the expert hearing in the parliament’s legal committee.] [The text has also been published in German in a slightly shorter version on Verfassungsblog.] One Step...
[Isabelle Hassfurther is a legal advisor in the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). The ECCHR submitted a statement on the draft bill and participated in the expert hearing in the parliament’s legal committee.] [The text has also been published in German in a slightly shorter version on Verfassungsblog.] On 6...
[Jérôme de Hemptinne is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University] Several posts have been devoted to the delicate question of whether Western States could be implicated in an international armed conflict (IAC) against Russia because of the military, financial, and intelligence support they provide to Ukrainian authorities (see here, here, here, and here). The same question could also be raised regarding...
[Dylan Jesse Andrian is a legal assistant for the Al Hassan Defence Team at the International Criminal Court and an LL.M. candidate at Cambridge University] Not even a year after the Monetary Gold principle was litigated in the ICJ’s 2023 Arbitral Award judgment (which I criticized in a post on Opinio Juris previously), Germany has invoked the same principle in its...