Africa

[David Matyas is a PhD Candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.] For over two weeks, violent and escalating clashes in the Tigray region of Ethiopia have resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of displaced persons and ever growing humanitarian needs in this mountainous region of northern Ethiopia. The parties to this conflict include the government of...

[J. Jarpa Dawuni is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University and the Founder and Executive Director of The Institute for African Women in Law.] In a joint press release issued on November 2, 2020 by the Institute for African Women in Law and the GQUAL Campaign, called on member-states of the United Nations to take gender into...

[Marko Svicevic is a post-doctoral research fellow at the South African Research Chair in International Law, University of Johannesburg.] Introduction The growing insurgency in Mozambique continues to worry its neighboring states and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) alike. Known as Ansar al-Sunna, the insurgency first arose in 2017 in Mozambique’s northern province of Cabo Delgado. By July 2019, it had pledged allegiance...

[Julianne Hughes-Jennett is a partner in Quinn Emanuel’s London office and the head of Quinn Emanuel’s Business and Human Rights Group. Laila Hamzi is a senior associate in Quinn Emanuel’s London office. Her practice focuses on international arbitration, public international law and business and human rights. Ram Mashru is an associate in Quinn Emanuel’s London office.  His practice focuses on...

[Emma Charlene Lubaale is an Associate Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law of Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.] This is an unusual piece of work. As opposed to merely engaging with theoretical rules and existing literature on the subject of complementarity; means of triggering the ICC’s jurisdiction; interaction between states and international law, etc., the author has apparently set himself the excellent task of...

[Rosemary Grey is a University of Sydney (Australia) Postdoctoral Fellow, based in the Sydney Law School & Sydney Centre for International Law. Valerie Oosterveld is a Professor at Western Law (Canada) and a member of the Canadian Partnership for International Justice and Rebecca Orsini is a second-year law student at Western Law (Canada) and a graduate of the University of Toronto.] Part 1 of this post discussed...

[Rosemary Grey is a University of Sydney (Australia) Postdoctoral Fellow, based in the Sydney Law School & Sydney Centre for International Law. Valerie Oosterveld is a Professor at Western Law (Canada) and a member of the Canadian Partnership for International Justice and Rebecca Orsini is a second-year law student at Western Law (Canada) and a graduate of the University of Toronto.] Recent months have seen an important shift...

Luca Ferro is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on International ‘Intervention’ in Theory and in Practice, assessing the legality of third-State involvement in the internal and external affairs of other States. Prematurely calling time of death on ‘negative equality’? On 5 and 6 December 2019, the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law (JUFIL) and the...

[Stephen Arthur Lamony is an International Law specialist, ex-Senior Foreign Policy Advisor-Amnesty International and ex-Head of Advocacy and Policy at the global Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC).] Introduction: The World Health Organization (WHO), published its first situation report on COVID -19 on January 20,  2020. When it reported a case of “pneumonia of unknown cause” on December 31, 2019. A lot has transpired since then. News...

[Sara Kendall is a Senior Lecturer in International Law at The University of Kent in the Faculty of Law. She is also Co-Director of The Centre for Critical International Law.] In early March 2020, the US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo gave a press briefing concerning the ICC Appeals Chamber’s decision on Afghanistan. As is widely known by Opinio Juris’s readership, the ICC’s prosecutor aimed to investigate...

[Olaf Zenker is a Professor at the Department for Anthropology and Philosophy at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). He is a political and legal anthropologist researching (post-)conflict, inequality and justice in Africa and Europe, especially in contexts of normative pluralities including international criminal law.] Kamari Clarke’s Affective Justice is an impressive accomplishment and important contribution to the expanding field of the anthropology of justice, and of...

[Christopher Gevers teaches international law and and legal theory in the School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal; his research focusses on Third World Approaches to International Law, critical race theory and law and literature.] This is the finest book on Africa’s relationship with the International Criminal Justice project that I have read; if not the last word on the subject, perhaps the first ‘sensible’ one. There...