In a recent article published in AJIL, I tried to develop a coherent theory of the doctrine of specially-affected states, first articulated by the ICJ -- and largely ignored thereafter -- in North Sea Continental Shelf. I concluded the article with a call to the Global South to invoke the doctrine more liberally in international litigation: This article, then, is not...
[Constance Kaempfer is writing a PhD on the role of subnational parliaments in implementing international obligations. Sophie Thirion conducts PhD research on trade measures in multilateral environmental agreements. Evelyne Schmid is an associate professor of public international law (http://www.ius-gentium.ch). All three authors are based at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.] On 25 November 2018, the Swiss population and the cantons voted on...
[Kingsley Abbott is the ICJ’s Senior International Legal Adviser for Global Accountability, and is based in Bangkok, Thailand. Twitter: @AbbottKingsley.] Later this month, the Fifth Committee of the UN General Assembly, responsible for budgetary and administrative matters, is likely to approve the budget for the “Ongoing Independent Mechanism” (OIM) for Myanmar created by resolution at the UN Human Rights Council last September....
[Beatrice Walton is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she was a Kerry Fellow at the Jackson Institute and a Herbert J. Hansell Student Fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges.] On Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) commenced an expedited hearing on the question of whether a member state can unilaterally revoke a notification of intent to withdraw...
I wasn't feeling particularly well on my recent long flight from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam, so I took advantage of my sickness to binge watch all eight episodes of BBC2's international criminal justice drama, Black Earth Rising, which focuses on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I wasn't expecting much, because BER was billed as a drama about the ICC. But I was...
Cocaine is a big problem in Latin America. According to the UN, 99.5% of worldwide coca cultivation is concentrated in just three countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Under pressure from the Global North, Latin American nations have reduced the problem to a plan to contain cocaine flows through mostly violent means, to disastrous humanitarian consequences. In several states, violence has...
On Wednesday, a court in the UAE sentenced a PhD student at Durham University, Matthew Hedges, to life imprisonment for supposedly "spying" for the British government. There is no evidence to support the spying allegation, and both Hedges and the British government vociferously deny it. By all accounts, Hedges was simply in the UAE to research the country's foreign and...
Facebook commissioned a human rights impact assessment into its presence in Myanmar by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which has recently released its report. While news outlets reported this as a mea culpa by Facebook regarding the use of its platform in contributing to atrocities in Myanmar – perhaps partly due to the product policy manager’s note in disseminating the report...
Between 1980 and 2000, Peru went through what Peruvians call “La Época del Terrorismo”, or “The Era of Terrorism”. In those years, the Shining Path, a Maoist-inspired terrorist group, launched an attack on Peruvian democracy seeking to establish a Khmer-Rouge-like dictatorship. According to Peru’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission, its Supreme Court, and The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the “Era...
[Alina Balta is a PhD Researcher at Tilburg Law School, INTERVICT. This blogpost is a product of the Intervict Reparations Initiative, commissioned by the NWO-VIDI Project, A Waste of Time or No Time to Waste, as well as a product of research carried out for the photobook ‘Portraits of Injustice: Forced marriage and related sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge’ due to be published in...
[Patryk I. Labuda is a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University School of Law.] News broke on Saturday, November 17, that the Central African Republic (CAR) had transferred Alfred Yekatom, alias ‘Rombot’ or ‘Rambo’, to the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to the arrest warrant, Yekatom has been charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes for acts allegedly committed...
[Ajita Banerjie is a research consultant with the International Commission of Jurists, based in India.] In a historic judgment pronounced on 6th September 2018, the Supreme Court of India declared the 157-year-old law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, unconstitutional in so far as it criminalizes consensual sexual relationships between same-sex adults. The landmark judgment in Navtej Singh Johar vs Union of India seeks to atone for...