Regions

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...

[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...

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...