Regions

[Jenny Domino is Associate Legal Adviser of the International Commission of Jurists. The piece draws upon her previous in-country work as Harvard Law School Satter Fellow, and builds on her forthcoming publication on legally conceptualizing Facebook’s role in Myanmar’s incitement landscape.] The recently concluded The Gambia v Myanmar provisional measures hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) renewed the focus on the crucial...

[Cale Davis is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He was previously a Prosecutor with the Northern Territory DPP and a Judge’s Associate at the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Australia. His research concerns prosecutorial discretion in international criminal justice.] From the rarefied corridors of The Hague’s international...

[Marta Bo is a Researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague.] On 14 November 2019, Pre-Trial Chamber III (PTC III) authorized the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes allegedly committed against the Rohingya population (Article 15 Decision). This decision was unsurprising in light of the Jurisdiction Decision delivered by Pre Trial Chamber...

The International Court of Justice has just last week commenced and concluded provisional measures hearings in a case between The Gambia and Myanmar. It is based on allegations of violations of the Genocide Convention and is the culmination of years of persecution of the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. While there have been waves of atrocities, in...

[Catalina Fernández Carter is a Chilean lawyer and holds and LLM from the University of Cambridge.] According to the latest report by the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights, 241 individuals have suffered eye injuries – several of them resulting in partial or total blindness – in the context of the social unrest the country has experienced since October. Images of people with eye patches have become a...

On 11 December 2019, Myanmar presented its case before the International Court of Justice, in the matter of provisional measures brought by The Gambia in relation to the Rohingya, under the Genocide Convention. Even though the hearings were for a specific determination – that of provisional measures – the arguments presented by Myanmar are a glimpse of the legal strategy...

Yesterday The Gambia commenced its arguments in the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, relating to the application of the Genocide Convention and the Rohingya. After filing its application on 11 November, in which The Gambia initiated the case at the ICJ and also asked the court to order interim measures of protection, the hearings over three days are for a specific purpose – to...

If there is one thing we can agree on is that recognition of belligerency is in disuse – that it is a relic of the 19th century and that it died off sometime before the Spanish Civil War, right? Recognition of belligerency either “fell into desuetude” or is in a state of “current total disuse”. In fact, says Prof. Sivakumaran, “at least since 1949, and more...

As readers are no doubt aware, the OTP has once again declined -- now for a third time -- to open an investigation into Israel's violent attack on the MV Mavi Marmara. That decision was wholly expected; the only question was how the OTP would deal with the Appeals Chamber's recent decision in the Comoros situation, in which the Chamber...

[Alexandra Lily Kather, is a Legal Advisor, International Crimes and Accountability Program, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). Silvia Rojas Castro is a ECCHR Critical Legal Trainee, International Crimes and Accountability Program, and Vandita Khanna is ECCHR Critical Legal Training Alumn*, International Crimes and Accountability Program.] 75 years after the Malaya Lolas (“Free Grandmothers”) were sexually enslaved by the...