In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Regions

14 Mar

[Mark Pollack is Professor of Political Science and Law, Director of Global Studies, and Jean Monnet Chair at Temple University in Philadelphia.] Reading Karen Alter and Larry Helfer’s Transplanting International Courts took me back, involuntarily, to graduate school, and more specifically to a moment of (in retrospect) misplaced outrage during my first-year International Relations Field Seminar. The professor in that seminar,...

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13 Mar

[Alexandra Huneeus is a Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.] Perhaps the most powerful lesson of Transplanting International Courts is to beware our own parochialism. After all, the only thing new about the Andean Court of Justice (ATJ) when Karen Alter and Laurence Helfer first noticed it was that US-based scholars had begun to take note. The...

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12 Mar

[Karen J. Alter is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University and a Permanent Visiting Professor at iCourts. Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University, and Permanent Visiting Professor at iCourts.] This Opinio Juris blog engages our findings about the Andean Tribunal of Justice, published in our book Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the...

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02 Mar

[Róisín Pillay is Director of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) Europe Programme.]  The European Court of Human Rights is once more facing a political challenge to its role, in proposals for a new political declaration put forward by the Danish Presidency of the Council of Europe.  That the Court’s extraordinary success in advancing human rights protection in Europe provokes the dissent...

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06 Feb

As Patryk Labuda noted earlier today on twitter, the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) has ordered the OTP to provide it with additional information concerning the investigation in Afghanistan. Here are the key paragraphs of the order: 3. The Chamber observes that the Prosecutor seeks authorisation to initiate an investigation for crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan from 1 May 2003 onwards,...

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22 Jan

At Lawfare yesterday, two law professors at West Point defended the US's right to attack North Korea if it tests another nuclear weapon or fires another missile into Japanese waters: North Korea is extraordinarily close to becoming a global nuclear power. This very real possibility has reportedly resulted in the United States debating a limited military strike dubbed the “bloody nose” strategy. In...

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17 Jan

Justice in Conflict has a guest post today from a scholar who has written a book about the Lubanga trial. I think the post makes some excellent points about the problems with the trial. But I have serious reservations -- acknowledging that I have not read the book -- about the author's take on why the trial did not focus...

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22 Dec

The Guardian is reporting today that Carter Page -- Donald Trump's bumbling former foreign-policy advisor, who has been interviewed quite extensively by the FBI regarding his contacts with Russia -- earned a PhD from SOAS in 2011 after failing his defence twice. Here are some snippets from the story: Page first submitted his thesis on central Asia’s transition from communism to capitalism in...

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16 Nov

Spreading the Jam has a guest post today from Santiago Vargas Niño criticising my argument that the OTP was required to notify Burundi as soon as it decided to ask the OTP to authorize the investigation. Here is what he says: Professor Heller cites Article 15(6) to argue that, by receiving information under articles 15(1) and 15(2) of the Statute, the Prosecution has...

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12 Nov

At Spreading the Jam, Dov Jacobs defends the Pre-Trial Chamber's conclusion in the Burundi situation that the OTP is not required to notify a state until after the PTC has authorized an investigation. Here are the critical paragraphs from his post: Note the different language used [in Art. 18] depending on whether there is a referral under 13(a) (state referral) or...

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10 Nov

Last week I argued that the OTP's failure to ask the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize an investigation prior to Burundi's withdrawal from the ICC becoming effective -- 28 October 2017 -- meant that the Court no longer had jurisdiction over crimes committed on Burundi's territory prior to that date. I still think my legal analysis is correct, but my factual...

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