In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Latin & South America

27 Nov

Cocaine is a big problem in Latin America. According to the UN, 99.5% of worldwide coca cultivation is concentrated in just three countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Under pressure from the Global North, Latin American nations have reduced the problem to a plan to contain cocaine flows through mostly violent means, to disastrous humanitarian consequences. In several states, violence has...

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21 Nov

Between 1980 and 2000, Peru went through what Peruvians call “La Época del Terrorismo”, or “The Era of Terrorism”. In those years, the Shining Path, a Maoist-inspired terrorist group, launched an attack on Peruvian democracy seeking to establish a Khmer-Rouge-like dictatorship. According to Peru’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission, its Supreme Court, and The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the “Era...

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08 Nov

As evidenced in Part I, Latin American states have not been keen to allow expansive interpretations of the rules for use force in foreign soil. Latin America is a region historically subjected to foreign intervention, and as such, the rules it designed, especially in the pre-Charter era, were always very much thought out from a perspective of protecting “the invaded”,...

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07 Nov

Ever since its very first articulations, the “unwilling or unable test” has relied heavily in the time-tested legitimacy of the 1837 Caroline Affair, where British forces sunk a vessel manned by Canadian rebels in American territory. Dressing such a visible and well-known case in the cloth of “unwilling or unable” allows its proponents to argue that its underlying principles have...

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30 Oct

[Renata Nagamine is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.] On October 28th, 2018, Brazilians chose their president for the next 4 years. The running candidates were Universidade de São Paulo Professor Fernando Haddad and Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a congressman in his 7th mandate who emerged as a prominent extreme-right figure during the impeachment of former President Dilma...

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25 Oct

[Massimo Frigo is a Senior International Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists.] 2018 continues to be a year marked by fierce disputes with regard to asylum, including what it is and what the obligations States have towards refugees or others entitled to international protection. More recently, Venezuela has been another example of the fact that a refugee crisis may...

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24 Oct

[Frédéric Mégret is an Associate Professor of Law at McGill University Faculty of Law.] On the 26th September, a group of diligent Haitian lawyers headed by human rights defender Patrice Florvilus requested an emergency injunction (“en référé”) before the Tribunal de Première Instance de Port-au-Prince against the State of Haiti, that would compel it to trigger the creation of the...

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22 Oct

Since February 21st, 2018, Rio de Janeiro has been under military intervention. Brazilian President, Michel Temer, has tasked the armed forces with ending the “serious endangerment of public order” caused by the drug war between various armed gangs and paramilitary militias in Rio’s favelas, or shantytowns. The use of armed forces for control of crime is not a strange occurrence...

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27 Aug

[Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is Professor of International Law at Universidad del Pacífico, in Peru.] After the social, political, economic, and humanitarian collapse of Venezuela at the hands of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorial government, Latin America (and South America in particular) is facing an unprecedented migratory crisis it does not seem to be ready for. As of 2017, the International Organization for Migration...

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20 Mar

[Ricardo Arredondo is Professor of Public International Law at the University of Buenos Aires.] 1. Introduction In recent months, Latin-American countries have been actors and witnesses of a heated debate, as tend to be those in which Venezuela participates or is the subject of the discussion. This time the issue revolves around the eventual participation of this country in the next VIII...

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15 Mar

[Luis Diez Canseco Nùñez served as a judge and then President of the Andean Tribunal of Justice, ending his tenure in 2017.] Alter and Helfer’s book Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice constitutes an important contribution to the study of the international dispute settlement system. It honors me, as a former Judge and President...

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