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11 Jul

[Valerie Oosterveld is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario (Western University) Faculty of Law in Canada and a faculty member with her university’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, also known as Western Space. Anne Campbell is a recent graduate of Western University and a current Western Space summer intern.] Plans for the extraction of water and minerals in outer space – particularly...

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11 Jul

[Jason Beckett teaches in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo.] We are taught to think of PIL as noble, benevolent, and weak; a tolerably just legal system unable to impose its will on an unjust world. This vision emphasises ethical PIL, humanity’s law, or international public law. It is an attractive vision, offering a noble, if Quixotic, quest to tame realpolitik....

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09 Jul

[Chantal Meloni is Associate Professor of International Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Milan (Italy) and is Senior Legal Advisor at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) of Berlin. The author worked on the submission in her capacity as senior legal advisor for international crimes at ECCHR.] On 1 July 2021 an important request  was submitted to the Office of...

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07 Jul

We at Opinio Juris take great pride in the fact that we have never, at any point in our 17-year history, asked readers to give us money. Fortunately, despite rarely having been flush with cash, we have never needed to. None of the permanent members of the blog have ever taken a penny for their blogging (which means I've been...

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06 Jul

[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.] There has been a flurry of discussion about the way in which the Rohingya community, particularly in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is receiving information about the various accountability mechanisms. On 7 June 2020 the Registry of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) reported...

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05 Jul

[Carlos Rafael Urquilla Bonilla is a Senior Attorney at Inter-American Institute of Social Responsibility and Human Rights (IIRESODH)] In August 1936, husband and wife Antonio Alomar Mas and Margalida Jaume Vandrel were forcibly disappeared in Manacor (Mallorca) leaving two daughters behind at ages 8 and 11 amidst the Civil War. Their case is a paradigmatic example of the multiple gross human rights violations committed during the Spanish Civil...

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05 Jul

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia. Part I can be found here.] A Collective Right to Existence Westphalian international law is not the best platform to address ‘dealing with the past’ issues (Koskenniemi). The Treaty of Westphalia itself contained a legal oblivion clause (Common Article II)...

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05 Jul

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia.] Genocide Disparities and Grotian Moments International law has been credited for normalizing, theorizing, and proliferating several systemic injustices, being the ‘culprit and the remedy’(Stahn) of/for an imperialistic order premised on centers and peripheries (Anghie). Although, such statements offer a recapitulation of the use and...

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02 Jul

[Maria Xiouri is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bedfordshire. Her book The Breach of a Treaty: State Responses in International Law was published by Brill in March 2021.] On 22 May 2020, the US submitted a notice of its intention to withdraw from the Treaty on Open Skies (‘OST’) to the Treaty Depositaries and to all other States parties to the Treaty (33...

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01 Jul

[Arvind Ganesan is business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch.] The United Nations formally recognized a decade ago that businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights. It was a groundbreaking development. 10 years later, it’s clear that it was only a first step: we need laws that enforce companies’ duty to protect workers and communities from abuse and hold them accountable if they...

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29 Jun

[Fiona de Londras is a Professor of Global Legal Studies at Birmingham University Law School. Ruth Houghton is an Assistant Professor at Newcastle University Law School and Aoife O'Donoghue is a Professor of International Law and Global Governance at Durham University Law School.] Being a feminist international lawyer is exhausting. We are not the first to say this, nor, sadly, will we be the last....

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28 Jun

[Iain Scobbie is the Chair in International Law at the University of Manchester. This post is a contribution in our recent symposium on Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law.] The understanding and implications of common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions have undergone a transformation since its inception.  The volume edited by Eve Massingham and Annabel McConnachie, ‘Ensuring Respect for...

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