[Rishi Gulati is a LSE Fellow in Law at the London School of Economics and a Barrister at the Victorian Bar.] The US Supreme Court has delivered its much awaited judgment in Jam v. International Finance Corporation, No. 17-1011, 27 February 2019 (‘Jam’ or the ‘Decision’. Two detailed posts by the author containing an analysis of the decisions of the courts...
Perhaps it is too early to be talking about a Venezuelan transition, but then again, it is never too early to be prepared. Presuming the Lima Group does avoid American military action in Venezuela and secures a workable plan for elections, how would a post-Maduro transitional justice scheme look like? Accountability seems to be of great importance to the Lima Group....
Nearly 100 employees recently released an open letter to Microsoft demanding that the company cancel its nearly $500 million contract with the Army to develop an Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS). I will let the employees explain why: The contract's stated objective is to "rapidly develop, test, and manufacture a single platform that Soldiers can use to Fight, Rehearse, and Train that...
A few hours ago, in the early hours of 26 February, news started trickling in of an Indian Air Force strike in Pakistani territory. There have been ominous rumblings of some form of retaliation for a suicide attack carried out on 14 February 2019, in which 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers were killed in Kashmir, and for which the Pakistani based terror...
The last time Venezuela faced the plight of war, almost 120 years ago, German and British gunboats deployed outside its ports, blockading them. After turbulent times, Venezuela had run out of money and was unable to pay its debts. In a classic display of pre-UN-Charter jus ad bellum, both the German Empire and the United Kingdom felt fully within their...
It is not often that the U.S. President and his chief trade representative debate fine points of international law in the Oval Office in front of the world’s press and senior Chinese officials. But President Trump and the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer did just that last Friday when they publicly debated whether the possible US-China trade deal would be...
Earlier this month, I attended the opening ceremony of an exhibit on “Women and War” at a museum in the Philippines. A survivor of war time atrocities, Lola Estelita, spoke about her experiences, moving many in the audience to tears. Many other survivors of wartime sexual slavery and atrocities – called the “Lolas” or grandmothers – are now no longer...
[Marcos Zunino is a Research Fellow at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the author of Justice Framed: A Genealogy of Transitional Justice (CUP 2019). Twitter: @MarcosZunino.] Argentina is a well-known case of transitional justice. From the pioneering 1984 truth commission and the prosecutions that had to be rolled back due...
Though most of the outrage was manufactured and hypocritical, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) deserved criticism for her ill-expressed tweet about AIPAC. But she has more than redeemed herself with this exchange with Elliott Abrams, Trump's Special Envoy to Venezuela, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting yesterday. It is a delight to watch Elliott Abrams' face as he is asked --...
As I was doing some research into the invasion of Cambodia by South Vietnamese and US forces in 1970, I came across two official government accounts of the invasion -- one by the US, the other by Australia, one of the six countries that sent ground troops to Vietnam. They tell a rather different story...
[Alonso Illueca is a lawyer and adjunct Professor of International Law and Human Rights at Universidad del Istmo.] It is highly unlikely that someone would argue that, currently, Venezuela is not affected by a disaster, i.e. a series of events resulting in widespread loss of life, great human suffering and distress, mass displacement and large-scale material damage, which are thereby disrupting...