Last week, the excellent lawyers at The Guernica Group, led by my friend Toby Cadman, filed an Article 15 communication with the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) arguing that the ICC should open an investigation into the deportation of civilians from Syria to Jordan. The communication itself is not public, so what we know of TGG's legal argument comes from their...
[Mark Drumbl is Professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law. His research and teaching interests include public international law, global environmental governance, international criminal law, post-conflict justice, and transnational legal process. This contribution was originally posted at legalsightseeing.org. ] International judges get so very few monuments in their honor. One such judge, however, has two. This judge is Radhabinod Pal, from India....
In a recent post at EJIL: Talk! on the India/Pakistan crisis, Mary Ellen O'Connell references a book chapter in which she suggests that Israel's 1976 raid on Entebbe was the first situation in which a state invoked the "unwilling or unable" doctrine as a jus ad bellum justification for self-defense: Christian Tams, Dire Tladi, and I will soon publish, Self-Defence Against Non-State...
The Philippines' withdrawal from the ICC becomes effective this Saturday, March 17. There are domestic legal proceedings underway that have the potential to nullify the withdrawal. But if the withdrawal goes forward, we are faced with an important question: what happens to the OTP's preliminary examination? This is, of course, Burundi redux. In that case, the OTP preserved its ability to...
Jean-Pierre Bemba, recently finally acquitted by the Appeals Chamber, dropped quite the legal bombshell last night on the ICC: he is demanding nearly €70,000,000 from the Court -- €22,000,000 in compensation for the 10 years he spent in detention; €4,000,000 in legal fees; and €42,400,000 for the economic loss he has suffered as a result of the Court's mismanagement of property it...
[Srinivas Burra is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Legal Studies, South Asian University, New Delhi.] Recent military strikes between India and Pakistan merit analysis to assess their legality under international law. As discussed (here and here), they have relevance to the discussions on the legality of the use of force, particularly in relation to the emerging debates on the...
[Alexandra Lily Kather is a Legal Advisor at ECCHR’s International Crimes and Accountability Program. Anne Schroeter is a Legal Advisor at ECCHR’s International Crimes and Accountability Program. This post represents the personal views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. This is Part II of a two-part post.] This change of course...
[Alexandra Lily Kather is a Legal Advisor at ECCHR’s International Crimes and Accountability Program. Anne Schroeter is a Legal Advisor at ECCHR’s International Crimes and Accountability Program. This post represents the personal views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. This is Part I of a two-part post.] With ISIL’s territorial control...
[Dhruv Sharma is an LLM Candidate and a Chevening Cambridge Trust Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is an alumnus of the National Law University, Delhi. Utkarsh Srivastava is an Advocate practising in the Courts and Tribunals in India. He is an alumnus of the National Law University, Delhi.] Prologue On 14 February 2019, a dastardly terrorist attack was carried...
The FAO has asked me to post the following advertisement for five positions with the organization. Three are based at FAO headquarters in Rome; the other two are in Addis and Dakar. We are currently recruiting for five positions; the announcements are posted here. The posts are in: Development Law Branch, which undertakes normative work and supports Member States in developing their legislation...
I wanted to call readers attention to a particularly interesting ongoing case regarding recognition of governments in the context of Venezuela. The case (Rusoro Mining Ltd. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela) revolves around damages caused to Rusoro, a Canadian company, by Venezuela’s nationalisation of the gold mining sector. In 2016, an ICSID tribunal ordered Venezuela to pay approximately one billion...
[Katayoun Hosseinnejad is a PhD graduate from Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and a university lecturer of international law in Iran and Pouria Askary is an assistant professor of international law at Allameh Tabataba’i University.] This post highlights some of the inconsistencies in the ICJ’s recent judgment on preliminary objections in the case of Certain Iranian Assets, which resulted in rejecting the...