In 2019, Bolivia saw one of its most turbulent political crises in recent memory. The OAS accused the government of committing electoral fraud to secure Evo Morales a controversial fourth term in office. One of the OAS’s main claims was that there had been a “drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing...
[Nicolás Carrillo-Santarelli is a Colombian lawyer, PhD on international law and international relations. He works as a researcher and lecturer of Public International Law at the Autónoma de Madrid University.] The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (hereinafter, also the Court) adopted an important decision in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic the 26th of May -which has the potential to have an impact beyond the specific situation analyzed...
[Federico J. Wynter is a J.D. Candidate and Charles Evan Hughes Scholar at Cornell Law School.] Venezuela is a reliable source of news. From the late March DOJ’s indictment of President Nicolás Maduro, to the early May bizarre coup attempt against Maduro, in 2020 Venezuela has been a major point of interest for international law and politics. One significant event that...
On May 3rd, a group of 60 Venezuelan expatriates and two American former Green Berets launched an operation to topple the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela. The operation looked more like something out of a bad streaming series than an actual military mission. Their plan was to arrive by boat at a fishing town north of the Capital, Caracas, somehow storm the heavily fortified...
[Ricardo Arredondo is a Professor of International Law and Diplomacy (UBA-UP-UB).] As a consequence of the “coronavirus disease pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19)” (hereinafter “coronavirus”), the international community is facing a transcendental crisis that is likely to generate significant change in the international order as we know it. The pandemic has come to clearly and unquestionably remind us of the vulnerability of people and the planet to global...
[Federico Neiburg is professor of anthropology at the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro and a member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. ] In December 2019, a new scandal surfaced concerning the actions of military personnel from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) between 2004 and 2017: hundreds...
[Rocío Quintero is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Latin American Programme, based in Colombia. She tweets from. @___Dew___. Timothy Fish Hodgson is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Africa Programme based in South Africa. He tweets from @TimFish42.] As part 1 of this blog illustrated, the Colombian government has taken policy measures to ensure that the right to health of Venezuelans has...
[Rocío Quintero is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Latin American Programme, based in Colombia. She tweets from @___Dew___. Timothy Fish Hodgson is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Africa Programme based in South Africa. He tweets from @TimFish42.] The COVID-19 pandemic has, perhaps more starkly than ever before, brought to the fore the importance of the realization of human rights,...
[Ciara Laverty is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Dieneke de Vos received her PhD in international criminal law from the European University Institute, Florence and currently works in the humanitarian sector on the prevention of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse.] On 11 February 2020, Colombia’s Constitutional Court made public its full reasoning in the precedent-setting tutela action...
Most readers will be familiar with the Caroline Affair. A group of Canadian rebels seized an American vessel and used it to transport ammunitions from the US to Canada. British forces raided the ship, burned it, killed two men, and sent its wreckage over the Niagara Falls. The incident gave rise to perhaps one of the most frequently quoted maxims in the law of use...
[Marta Bo is a Researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague.] On 14 November 2019, Pre-Trial Chamber III (PTC III) authorized the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes allegedly committed against the Rohingya population (Article 15 Decision). This decision was unsurprising in light of the Jurisdiction Decision delivered by Pre Trial Chamber...
[Catalina Fernández Carter is a Chilean lawyer and holds and LLM from the University of Cambridge.] According to the latest report by the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights, 241 individuals have suffered eye injuries – several of them resulting in partial or total blindness – in the context of the social unrest the country has experienced since October. Images of people with eye patches have become a...