In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Regions

29 Oct

International law is famously mushy and subject to a variety of interpretations.  But there are some issues upon which there is more consensus under international law, such as the illegality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  But is there any reasonable argument favoring the legality of the Catalan Parliament’s recent declaration of independence from Spain?  I don’t think so. At the outset,...

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25 Oct

I have just posted on SSRN a draft of a (very) long article entitled "Specially-Affected States and the Formation of Custom." It represents my first real foray into both "classic" public international law and postcolonial critique. Here is the abstract: Although the US has consistently relied on the ICJ’s doctrine of specially-affected states to claim that it and other powerful states...

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28 Aug

Over the next three days we will be featuring an online discussion of my SOAS colleague and TAU law professor Aeyal Gross's new book for Cambridge University Press, The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (CUP, 2017). The book develops ideas that Aeyal discussed on Opinio Juris -- in a symposium on the functional approach to occupation -- more...

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18 Aug

Saudi-owned TV news network Al Arabiya aired a video simulation yesterday that shows a Saudi Arabian fighter shooting an air-to-air missile at a Qatari Airways plane. Here is the video: That's bad enough -- but what is truly horrifying is the accompany voiceover, which intones the following: International law permits states to shoot down any aircraft that violates a state’s airspace, classing...

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17 Aug

Snapshot of two days in the life of the ICC. On Tuesday, the ICC issued a new arrest warrant in the Libya situation -- for Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a commander in the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), which defected from the Libyan army during the revolution and is currently vying for power with the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The arrest warrant represents...

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17 Jul

[Dr. Aaron Matta is an expert in international law with working experience at International Courts. He also recently co-founded The Hague Council on Advancing International Justice, a network for and with practitioners, academics, and policymakers in the area of international justice. I would like to thank Dr. Philip Ambach and Anda Scarlat for their feedback on earlier drafts of this commentary.The...

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15 Jun

One of the most basic assumption of ICL is that an act cannot be a war crime unless it violates a rule of international humanitarian law (IHL). Article 6(b) of the London Charter criminalised "War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war." Article 3 of the ICTY Statute provides that "[t]he International Tribunal shall have the power to prosecute...

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11 Jun

I've got a new draft article up on SSRN (you can download it here) entitled China and the U.S. Strategic Construction of Cybernorms: the Process is the Product.  It was written for a really great inter-disciplinary workshop held at Stanford Law School earlier this Spring by the Hoover Institution's National Security, Technology and Law Working Group (which is chaired by...

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10 Jun

Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that one of my pet peeves is the incorrect usage of international legal terms in public and diplomatic discourse.  Hence, Israel did NOT commit "piracy" during the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid despite lots of governments claiming otherwise.  Cuba is not under a "blockade" despite tons of Cuban government propaganda otherwise. So you can imagine my...

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09 Jun

Distracted by #ComeyDay and other international crises, I missed this recent U.S. federal court decision in Sexual Minorities of Uganda v. Lively, dismissing an Alien Tort Statute lawsuit on Kiobel extra-territoriality grounds.  While using unusually critical language to denounce U.S. pastor-defendant Scott Lively's involvement in Uganda's anti-homosexual laws and actions, the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts held: ...

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07 Jun

The estimable professor-pundit Daniel Drezner has a typically smart blogpost on President Trump's refusal to affirm the U.S. commitment to Article 5's collective defense provision of the North Atlantic Treaty.  I don't have a problem with his views here, but I can't help jumping in to correct this paragraph from his post: So why is this such a big deal of a story? The United...

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