A couple of days ago, Iran issued an arrest warrant for Donald Trump, alleging that he is responsible for murder and terrorism in connection with the drone strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani last January. Practical problems aside -- Interpol has already refused to issue a Red Notice for Trump's arrest -- there is an important legal barrier to prosecuting Trump:...
[John B. Quigley is Emeritus Professor of Law at Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.] The annexation, now under consideration by Israel, of land in occupied Palestine is aimed, in part, at bringing many of Israel’s settlements into the territory of Israel. Annexation, however, may bring the unintended consequence of the loss of those very settlements. Much of the land on which the...
Along with 187 other American lawyers and legal scholars, I have signed a statement condemning the Trump administration's Executive Order permitting the US to sanction individuals involved with the ICC's investigation into the situation in Afghanistan. It's quite a list of signatories, including three former US war-crimes ambassadors and a number of former judges and prosecutors at various international criminal...
[Srinivas Burra is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Legal Studies at South Asian University, New Delhi; Haris Jamil is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at University of Delhi, New Delhi.] On 15 June 2020, there was a violent face-off in the Galwan valley, in the western sector of the China-India border. Soldiers from China and India scuffled at the border, which led to...
Luca Ferro is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on International ‘Intervention’ in Theory and in Practice, assessing the legality of third-State involvement in the internal and external affairs of other States. Prematurely calling time of death on ‘negative equality’? On 5 and 6 December 2019, the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law (JUFIL) and the...
[Aparajitha Narayanan currently works as a Legal Intern for the UNIRMCT and for Global Rights Compliance, The Hague. She holds an Adv. LL.M. in Public International Law from Leiden University (2019).] Introduction As a planet we are currently going through an unfortunate phase where the global order has taken a disruptive hit. Many believe that it is perhaps impossible to recover from this pandemic-created sinkhole, since COVID-19 has...
[Gabriella Citroni is Senior Researcher in International Law and Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She is also senior legal advisor of the NGO TRIAL International. Aintzane Márquez is Senior Attorney at Women’s Link Worldwide. Both organizations work to ensure that crimes committed against women and girls during wartime, under dictatorships and in context of oppression...
[Dr. Michael Kearney is a legal researcher with Al-Haq.] A March 2020 Amicus Brief submitted by Palestinian human rights organisations, including Al-Haq, to the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court suggested that the Court’s territorial jurisdiction extends to Palestine’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a jurisdictional space derived from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, was proclaimed by Palestine in September 2019....
[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.] David Eichert’s “Concerns about the non-inclusion of sexual violence against men and boys in the Gambia v Myanmar” raises important points in relation to the characterisation of sexual violence as being a primarily female experience in the clearance operations perpetrated by the Myanmar...
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...
There is nothing more rewarding for an academic -- at least for this academic -- than seeing a student go on to do great things. I've been fortunate to have many wonderful students over the years, but there is no one I am more proud of than Golriz Ghahraman, whom I taught at the University of Auckland long ago and...