In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Regions

07 Mar

[Vito Todeschini is a legal expert focusing on human rights and accountability in the context of Palestine/Israel and the wider MENA region.] Introduction In September 2022, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (COI), and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967...

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04 Mar

Growing up in Lima, I heard the mythologized story of Columbus “discovering” America (the continent, sorry US) a million times: In a leap of faith, Queen Isabel of Spain sold her Crown jewels to finance a daring explorer’s expedition to unknown lands. Nobody believed in him, but Columbus persevered, proving everyone wrong and discovering a land no one else knew about, on three little caravels,...

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03 Mar

[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. He has recently published The Democratisation of the European Union.] Seventy years after the start of the experiment with pooling sovereignty, the European Union turns out to embody the most significant innovation of the modern state system so far. The hallmark of the EU in its present form is that it...

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28 Feb

Brazil is back. After four years of retrenchment, the new Lula government seems ready to assume, once again, a key position in the international stage. This is a role that Lula knows how to play well. His previous government created the now defunct Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), meant as a counter-weight to a US-dominated OAS. By the time he left office, the region...

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27 Feb

[Dr Cristiano d’Orsi is a Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the South African Research Chair in International Law (SARCIL), Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg. He holds a Ph.D. in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. His research interests focus mainly on the development of Public International Law in Africa.] In its most basic...

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13 Feb

[Dr Tibisay Morgandi is Assistant Professor of International Energy Law at Queen Mary University of London and the author of State Energy Agreements (CUP, forthcoming 2023). The views expressed in this paper are the author’s alone.] Introduction Energy - in the form of gas, nuclear and electricity - has in several different ways played a significant role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Energy...

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12 Feb

[Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School.] ‘it is the position of the State Party that, the acts complained of have neither the required level of intensity or cruelty nor the impermissible purpose to permit them to be defined as torture. Further, the acts complained of do not meet the standard so as to fall within...

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12 Feb

[Máiréad Enright is Professor of Feminist Legal Studies at Birmingham Law School.] On October 31 2022, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) published its decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland. Mrs. Coppin is 73 years old and spent her early life in State-funded, religious-run carceral institutions. She was born in a county home to a teenage single mother. Aged two, she...

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10 Feb

[Ruwadzano Patience Makumbe is a human rights lawyer. Edward Kahuthia Murimi is a Kenyan lawyer. They are both currently undertaking PhD research as part of the ‘DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication’ Project (funded by ERC) at the Human Rights Centre, Ghent University (Belgium).] Introduction  In November 2020, a conflict broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia pitting the Ethiopian...

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31 Jan

1 February marks the second anniversary of the coup d’état in Myanmar. In the past year, the situation for the population has only become more fraught and difficult. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 2,890 individuals have been killed, likely an underestimation, 16,000 have been detained on spurious charges, scores have been tortured, many have been sentenced to death,...

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