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[Mohammad Mishal is a graduate of the Advanced Master in European and international human rights law at Leiden University and has most recently worked as Academic Coordinator of the same programme] Introduction  In a 2021 article, Dapo Akande and Antonios Tazanakopoulos posit that when a state’s territory is occupied by an unlawful armed attack, the occupation continues the attack, allowing the injured state...

[Guy S Goodwin-Gill is Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford and Honorary Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney] Few if any of us will ever meet Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, or others of that ilk who have organised the aberrant architecture of genocide and encouraged the climate of death, maiming, starvation and destruction that is Gaza today. No independent...

[Christine Evans is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the law faculty of Lund University and a human rights practitioner/investigator who has worked for the UN. Nieves Molina is an international lawyer and former senior UN officer. She is writing in her own capacity.] This post argues that the current political situation requires urgent and critical reconsideration of the role that sanctions can...

[Kate McInnes is a Vancouver-based criminal defence lawyer and the Principal at Arendt Chambers, Canada's first and only law firm practicing exclusively in international human rights law and international justice] The creation of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (STCAU), a court embedded within the Council for Europe framework, marks a historic effort in securing accountability for...

[MohammadMehdi Seyed Nasseri is a researcher at the Center for Ethics and Law Studies and lecturer at Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran). He holds a PhD in public international law from Islamic Azad University, UAE Branch (Dubai).] Access to justice is one of the fundamental principles of the rule of law and a cornerstone in guaranteeing human rights, whose effective realization acquires...

[Angel Cabrera is a Mexican human rights lawyer and an Assistant Professor of international law and human rights at the University of Washington Tacoma. He holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from the University of Guadalajara.] In a request submitted last December, Guatemala asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the “Court”) to issue an...

[Saparya Sood is a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (Bonn, Germany). She is a lawyer qualified in India and received her postgraduate degree in law and economics as a recipient of an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Views expressed are personal.] The European Commission recently introduced the Omnibus Package on 26 February 2025. While presented as...

[Dr Sally Longworth is a researcher and Julia Dalman is an analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency] On 2 May 2025, a Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicle (USV) successfully engaged a Russian fighter jet close to a Russian naval base in the eastern Black Sea. The attack was likely carried out by a Magura-V7. The two-person crew of the fighter jet...

[Ole Aldag, LL.M. (Aberdeen) is a bar-registered lawyer in Düsseldorf (Germany) and a doctoral student at Bielefeld University] When international law’s core prohibitions are violated in full daylight, accompanied by strained legal justifications of actors showing no restraint in exercising their powers— what remains of its authority? The prohibition on the use of force has always operated in tension with global...

[Jinan Bastaki is an associate professor of legal studies at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a visiting fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford] On the 19th of July 2025, Keir Starmer, the UK’s Prime Minister, threatened Israel with recognizing a Palestinian state if Israel did not end the ‘appalling situation’ in Gaza. While the UK is effectively...