In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Europe

30 Jul

[Briony Potts is a Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists] Sajid Javid, UK Home secretary, has undertaken an extraordinary move that suggests an unprecedented shift in the UK’s previously held position of an absolute stance against the death penalty. Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh were the last two men of a group known as “the Beatles”, so nicknamed because...

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21 Mar

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD cand. at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and former national expert to the Hellenic Parliamentary Committee on WWII Reparations. This is the second part of a two-part posting. The first part can be found here.]  Having completed a preliminary debate on the FR’s arguments regarding ICCs [Part I], in this second part we examine the legal...

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20 Mar

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD cand. at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and former national expert to the Hellenic Parliamentary Committee on WWII Reparations. This is the first part of a two-part posting.]  As already known, between the Hellenic Republic and Germany there is a long standing and unresolved dispute regarding WWII reparations arising –among others– from individual compensatory claims...

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02 Mar

[Róisín Pillay is Director of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) Europe Programme.]  The European Court of Human Rights is once more facing a political challenge to its role, in proposals for a new political declaration put forward by the Danish Presidency of the Council of Europe.  That the Court’s extraordinary success in advancing human rights protection in Europe provokes the dissent...

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29 Oct

International law is famously mushy and subject to a variety of interpretations.  But there are some issues upon which there is more consensus under international law, such as the illegality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  But is there any reasonable argument favoring the legality of the Catalan Parliament’s recent declaration of independence from Spain?  I don’t think so. At the outset,...

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25 Oct

I have just posted on SSRN a draft of a (very) long article entitled "Specially-Affected States and the Formation of Custom." It represents my first real foray into both "classic" public international law and postcolonial critique. Here is the abstract: Although the US has consistently relied on the ICJ’s doctrine of specially-affected states to claim that it and other powerful states...

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17 Jul

[Dr. Aaron Matta is an expert in international law with working experience at International Courts. He also recently co-founded The Hague Council on Advancing International Justice, a network for and with practitioners, academics, and policymakers in the area of international justice. I would like to thank Dr. Philip Ambach and Anda Scarlat for their feedback on earlier drafts of this commentary.The...

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07 Jun

The estimable professor-pundit Daniel Drezner has a typically smart blogpost on President Trump's refusal to affirm the U.S. commitment to Article 5's collective defense provision of the North Atlantic Treaty.  I don't have a problem with his views here, but I can't help jumping in to correct this paragraph from his post: So why is this such a big deal of a story? The United...

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18 Mar

This morning President Trump tweeted that "Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!" But that's not how NATO commitments work. And so this afternoon, former US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder gave President Trump a tutorial in nine tweets. Maybe we can...

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16 Dec

As discussed in my previous post, last month I was privileged to organize a conference at Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway on the topic of UK trade and Brexit. I discussed the first session in my previous post, which addressed UK trade negotiations with the EU. [embed]https://youtu.be/V5MYdhzXGAM?list=PLUqez-g-qh0lEWRv2XxnmZ_MmPRPZTzTD[/embed] In our second session, we discussed the topic of UK trade negotiations...

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08 Dec

On November 7, 2016 I was privileged to organize a conference at the University of Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway on the topic of UK trade and Brexit. The conference had three sessions: (1) UK trade negotiations with the EU; (2) UK trade negotiations outside the EU; and (3) UK’s post-Brexit status within the WTO. The participants were...

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