In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Criminal Law

23 Dec

[Miguel Lemos is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Coimbra] On 14 November 2023, a French court issued an arrest warrant for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad on “charges of complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes”. On 26 June 2024, this decision was upheld by the Court of Appeals of Paris. The prosecutor-general at the Paris court...

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23 Dec

[Bruno Biazatti is a doctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law, University of Luxembourg, and a doctoral student at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil] On 24 July, the Trial Chamber V (TC-V) of the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court) issued its judgment in the Yekatom and Ngaïssona case, convicting both co-defendants of war crimes and...

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22 Dec

[Heybatollah Najandimanesh is an associate professor of international law at Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran] Introduction   The incorporation of international crimes into domestic legislation marks a pivotal stage in the development of international criminal law (ICL). Iran’s proposed Iran’s Draft Bill on International Crimes (IDBIC) seeks to criminalise genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression within its national legal framework. This initiative...

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16 Dec

[Sabrina Rewald is a lawyer and independent legal consultant specialising in criminal justice, human rights, and technology, and a co-founder of Fénix Foundation. Basile Simon is the director of the law program at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, and a fellow at Stanford University. Emma Irving is an independent legal consultant specialising in standards for digital evidence, and a co-founder of...

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08 Dec

[Dr. Akanksha Bisoyi is a post-doctoral researcher at the Professorship of Law, Innovation and Legal Design, Technical University of Munich in Germany]  Introduction Photographs as legal tools for truth-telling reflect the aphorism ‘seeing is believing’. These images range from visual depictions of war crimes to human rights violations, affirming their role in the objective portrayal of historical events. Photographs are forensic evidentiary mediums that are, paradoxically,...

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02 Dec

[Lisa Davis is a professor of law at CUNY Law School, and the ICC special adviser on Gender and Other Discriminatory Crimes. Kirby Anwar is a Visiting Associate Professor at Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic, CUNY School of Law, senior legal advisor at MADRE and member of the Gender Persecution in Afghanistan Accountability Working Group.] As governments move to negotiate a long-awaited...

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01 Dec

[Ezequiel Jimenez has a PhD in international law (Middlesex University, United Kingdom), works at Amnesty International and is Senior Fellow at the Center for International Law Research and Policy. His forthcoming book about the history and practice of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute will be published on 18 December 2025.] The 125 States Parties to the Rome...

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28 Nov

[Rossella Pulvirenti is a Senior Lecturer in Manchester Law School (UK), specialising in international criminal law and human rights, with a specific focus on evidence and witnesses’ rights] The evidentiary landscape of international criminal justice is undergoing a profound transformation through the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT). OSINT marks the third major revolution in evidentiary approaches to prosecuting mass atrocity crimes....

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17 Nov

[Kurt Mundorff is the author of A Cultural Interpretation of the Genocide Convention (Routledge, 2020)] Russia’s longstanding practice of removing Ukrainian children from occupied territories and transferring them to special camps or for adoption by Russian families expanded exponentially with its 2022 invasion. Scholars with the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (YHRL) found that “[m]ore than 19,000 children from Ukraine have been deported to...

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17 Nov

[Kurt Mundorff is the author of A Cultural Interpretation of the Genocide Convention (Routledge, 2020)] Part 1 outlined the cultural genocide exclusion doctrine and conducted a textual interpretation of the Genocide Convention. As I discussed, most exclusionists bypass the convention’s text, and for good reason. Not only does the text omit any exclusionist language it also appears to support a more culture-centric idea...

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