North America

[Javier S Eskauriatza is a Lecturer at Birmingham Law School.] Introduction In October 2020, it was a surprise when the U.S. arrested the former Mexican Defence Secretary, General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, on drug-trafficking and corruption charges, at an airport in Los Angeles, California. The indictment accused Cienfuegos of participating in an international conspiracy to manufacture heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana, to import and distribute them in the...

Summer School Al-Haq International Law Online Summer School Program: Al-Haq Center for Applied International Law is pleased to announce its Seventh International Law Summer School for professionals, legal researchers, post-graduates and academics in the fields of international law and human rights. The 2021 program will run entirely online through ten days from 31st May – 12th June 2021. The summer school aims to assist professionals...

[Felicity Gerry is an international QC and Professor of Legal Practice.]  [Sue Milne is a lecturer, PhD candidate and scholar of public law at the University of South Australia, Justice and Society.] [Cate Read is a Trial Division Researcher, Supreme Court of Victoria.] [Eamonn Kelly is a Barrister, Victorian Bar and ad hoc admission in England and Wales for the Shamima Begum Appeal.] Photo Credit:...

Photo credit: University of Toronto [Vincent Wong is a Canadian Lawyer and PhD Student at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he examines barriers to education for undocumented youth in Canada and the relation of those exclusions to racialized divisions of labour. Vincent was previously an Adjunct Professor and William C. Graham Research Associate at the International Human Rights Program at the...

[Paolo Caroli is a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Humboldt-University of Berlin.] If the US were a Netflix saga, the current season would be the most captivating: the killing of George Floyd and the following BLM protests, a pandemic which has already killed more Americans than WWII, the storming of the Capitol, the (now ex-)President of the United States banned from all social media....

[Parisa Zangeneh is a PhD student at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway and the Editorial Assistant of Opinio Juris, and Sharon Pia Hickey is an international human rights lawyer focusing on the death penalty, gender equality, and the rule of law. Both authors are former employees of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.] Lisa Montgomery, a severely...

[Assistant Professor at the Poznań Human Rights Centre, Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.] The Trump administration’s ‘family separation policy’ has been widely reported and criticized (see for example here and here). Recently, the public learned of the policy’s horrible long-term effects: in October 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed that parents of 545 children...

[Hadi Dadmehr is a PhD candidate in Public International law at the National University of Iran (SBU). Hadi was Head of the Department of Law at the University of Zabol, Iran,  for 6 years. You can find him on Twitter @HadiDadmehr.] Donald Trump, the 45th U.S. president, repeatedly claimed during his campaign rallies that the first call he would receive after winning the election would be...

[Chiara Redaelli is a Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy, where she works for the Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts (RULAC) and the Disruptive Military Technologies projects.] Over the past days, the world has been closely following the US presidential election. On Saturday, November 7, after days of uncertainty, Joe Biden won the election. As it is well-known, concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic and the risk of potentially...

[Kathryn Hampton is a senior program officer with Physicians for Human Rights, based in New York City.] On 31 August, a Portland, Oregon, police officer was filmed by a journalist as the officer ran after retreating protestors in a Black Lives Matter protest: he is shown tackling one protestor to the pavement at a full run and then repeatedly punching him. The protestor was pinned...