In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Regions

22 Sep

[Sithuthukile Mkhize, Head of Political and Civil Rights at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of Witwatersrand. Omhle Ntshingila is project coordinator of the Right2Protest Project housed at University of Witwatersrand.] South Africa’s democracy post-apartheid, which is popularly referred to as the period after the country’s first, fully-democratic elections in 1994, is often celebrated and praised for being one of the most advanced because of its...

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19 Sep

[Louisa Handel-Mazzetti is an Assistant Professor at the Royal Netherlands Defense Academy (NLDA) and a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University] In May 2025, President Trump unveiled the 175 billion dollar plan to build the Golden Dome missile shield, originally introduced in January 2025. Drawing inspiration from Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) and...

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15 Sep

[Antonia Mulvey is the Founder and Executive Director of Legal Action Worldwide Terry Flyte is the Programme Manager for Lebanon and Syria at Legal Action Worldwide] Over the past two decades, Lebanon has taken notable steps to address human trafficking occurring within its territory. In 2008, the country ratified the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent,...

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12 Sep

[Gabriel Andrés Concha Botero is a Colombian lawyer and consultant at the International Direction of the National Agency for Legal Defense of the State, and currently pursuing a Master’s in International Law at Universidad del Rosario] On June 2, 2025, Guatemala’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity requested arrest warrants for Iván Velásquez and Adriana Camargo, both Colombian nationals and former members...

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09 Sep

[Róisín Pillay is a supervisor and Ayşe Bingöl Demir is the director of the Turkey Human Rights Litigation Support Project, a Middlesex University School of Law–based initiative focused on strategic litigation, research, and advocacy] In a courtroom in Istanbul on 9 September, a trial will take place that may be all too emblematic of our times. Leaders of the Istanbul Bar...

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03 Sep

[Mohammad Mishal is a graduate of the Advanced Master in European and international human rights law at Leiden University and has most recently worked as Academic Coordinator of the same programme] Introduction  In a 2021 article, Dapo Akande and Antonios Tazanakopoulos posit that when a state’s territory is occupied by an unlawful armed attack, the occupation continues the attack, allowing the injured state...

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01 Sep

[Christine Evans is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the law faculty of Lund University and a human rights practitioner/investigator who has worked for the UN. Nieves Molina is an international lawyer and former senior UN officer. She is writing in her own capacity.] This post argues that the current political situation requires urgent and critical reconsideration of the role that sanctions can...

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01 Sep

[Kate McInnes is a Vancouver-based criminal defence lawyer and the Principal at Arendt Chambers, Canada's first and only law firm practicing exclusively in international human rights law and international justice] The creation of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (STCAU), a court embedded within the Council for Europe framework, marks a historic effort in securing accountability for...

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27 Aug

[Theodore Hanna is an LL.M. candidate in International and European Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens] Introduction On 18 July 2025, the European Union adopted its eighteenth package of sanctions against Russia, one of its most robust to date, tightening measures on Russia’s energy, banking, and defense sectors. Uniquely, this package targets investor–State dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, a system that...

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26 Aug

[Angel Cabrera is a Mexican human rights lawyer and an Assistant Professor of international law and human rights at the University of Washington Tacoma. He holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from the University of Guadalajara.] In a request submitted last December, Guatemala asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the “Court”) to issue an...

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21 Aug

[Saparya Sood is a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (Bonn, Germany). She is a lawyer qualified in India and received her postgraduate degree in law and economics as a recipient of an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Views expressed are personal.] The European Commission recently introduced the Omnibus Package on 26 February 2025. While presented as...

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