In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Themes

01 May

[Kamya Vishwanath is an international trade lawyer based in India and will be pursuing her LLM at Georgetown University Law Centre this fall] “If you want to make it as a radical critic these days, slip the word 'body' into your title" Terry Eagleton  ‘Caste’ is a relatively modern concept and a preeminent source of racialized violence in India and the...

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30 Apr

[Suraj Girijashanker is a Residential Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the nexus between race, empire and international law, particularly in the context of migration] Over the past year, racist violence and abuse targeting Indians across the First World have surged. From attacks on Indian migrants in Ireland to a...

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30 Apr

The 1990s marked a critical decade in the global recognition of climate change and its impacts. The 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil stands out as a decisive turning point, with states from across the world adopting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In doing so, they acknowledged that high-income countries bear greater responsibility for climate change due...

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29 Apr

[Yang Han, PhD, is a Research Associate at China Centre, University of Oxford] Racism has been integral to international relations: e.g., scientific racism, social Darwinism, and the “yellow peril” discourses, just to name a few. Racist beliefs were often used to justify colonialism and imperialism, and invoked to instigate violence, hatred, and discrimination. Likewise, the principle of sovereign equality helps states...

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28 Apr

[Dr Shahab Saqib is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham Law School] Illumination rests on comparison. Comparing those who are situated in similar circumstances but are treated differently generates a desire to demystify the logic and circumstances that enable such discrepancies to emerge and to persist.  In my chapter, I use illumination to unpack the racial logic of...

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28 Apr

[Jinan Bastaki is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at New York University, Abu Dhabi] During the UN General Assembly high-level week (September 2025), the US Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, delivered a presentation entitled “The Global Refugee and Asylum System: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It.” He made five points: a) every nation has the right to...

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27 Apr

[Karla Schröter is a doctoral researcher at Åbo Akademi University, where she is part of the Institute for Human Rights and the Minority Research profile] Veils worn by Muslim women, whether a hijab worn in public institutions or face-veils in public spaces, are being gradually banned in Europe. Sadly, the European Court of Human Rights (“the Court”) has repeatedly opined that...

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27 Apr

[Mohsen al Attar is an Associate Dean (Education) and Reader in International Law at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University] International law is often on the ropes. Each time a state invades another, a security agent tortures a suspect, or a wanted war criminal hobnobs with other state leaders, we are reminded that what international law could be is always tempered by what it...

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23 Apr

[Dr Sergey Sayapin is Professor of Law at KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan) and Distinguished Visiting Global Scholar at the NUS Centre for International Law (2025)] If climate change exposes the limits of consent-based governance in ecological systems, technological disruption reveals a parallel fragility in the architecture of international law. Artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and cyber-autonomous systems do not simply pose new regulatory challenges – they transform the...

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27 Mar

[Natasa Mavronicola is a Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham; co-editor of Coercive Human Rights: Positive Duties to Mobilise the Criminal Law under the ECHR (Hart 2020); author of Torture, Inhumanity and Degradation under Article 3 of the ECHR: Absolute Rights and Absolute Wrongs (Hart 2021). Mattia Pinto is a lecturer at York Law...

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27 Mar

[Pablo Gavira-Díaz is a Spanish lawyer specializing in international humanitarian law and international criminal law. He holds a PhD in public international law from the University of Kiel and currently works as a Project Officer at the International Nuremberg Principles Academy] Introduction The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 following the withdrawal of U.S. forces and other allies from...

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26 Mar

[Andreina Nicoletti is a PhD candidate at the Centre d’études internationales et européennes (CEIE), at the University of Strasbourg. Her research focuses on the institution, the use and the effects of the veto power by the permanent members (P5) of the United Nations Security Council] On the early morning of January 3, 2026, Nicolás Maduro Moros and his wife Cilia Flores...

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