Photo credit: Harold Stern The world has lost James Crawford, a luminary of international law in the truest sense of the word. Indeed, Judge Crawford was one of the few people alive who could rightly be called a luminary of international law, or a luminary of any field at all. He was, to use Professor Iain Scobbie’s phrase, one of the...
The Power of Depositary, ICC and Palestine’s Quest for Statehood [Saba Pipia is an Associate Professor at the Georgian-American University (Tbilisi, Georgia) and visiting Fulbright researcher at Michigan State University. He holds a Ph.D. degree from Tbilisi State University.] Photo credit: Saba Pipia On February 5, Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced its ruling confirming the Court’s jurisdiction to...
[Parisa Zangeneh is a PhD student at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is a recipient of the Hardiman Scholarship.] In 2020, the volume Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law was published as part of the Routledge Research in the Law of Armed Conflict Book Series. Edited by Eve Massingham and Annabel McConnachie, the book explores the various ways in which Common Article 1 (CA1) of...
[Dr Rosemary Grey is a lecturer at Sydney Law School.] Last week’s hearing in the Abd-al-Rahman case, one of the ICC’s long-awaited ‘Sudan’ cases, marks a step forward in the Court’s practice in prosecuting gender-based crimes. It is the first ICC case in which crimes committed exclusively against men and boys have been expressly charged as gender-based crimes (specifically, as persecution on intersecting...
[Valentina Cadelo is a Legal Adviser at International Commission of Jurists' Middle East and North Africa Programme.] Today, Tunisia marked the third anniversary of the opening of trials before the Specialized Criminal Chambers (SCC), the very first example of domestic criminal trials related to past gross human rights violations in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Three years ago, when...
[Ady Niv is a Legal Officer at the United Nations. The author has previously worked at the Chambers of the ICTR, ICTY and IRMCT and at the International Commission of Inquiry for Mali. The views expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.] Introduction The purpose of this contribution is...
[Frédéric Mégret is a Full Professor and Dawson Scholar and co-Director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law, McGill University.] Photo credit: AP Photo/Adel Hana Concerned member of the public (CMP): Gaza! Civilians killed! Lots of them! WAR CRIME!!! LOAC expert: Well, not really. Actually it’s much more complicated than that. Let me explain how this works...
[Jeff Deutch, PhD, is Research Director at Mnemonic and co-founder of Syrian Archive. Libby McAvoy, Esq., is a legal fellow with Mnemonic and the Video as Evidence program at WITNESS.] Photo credit: Syrian Archive. Whether in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Hong Kong, Myanmar, the United States, Nigeria, Brasil, or elsewhere, over the last ten years civil society actors have produced and shared more content...
[Shehzad Charania is the interim Director General and Head of the Attorney General’s Office in London.] On 12 February 2021, Karim Khan QC was elected Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. His nine-year term will begin on 16 June 2021. Khan has had a stellar career as an international criminal lawyer, and is currently the Special Adviser and Head of the UN...
[Dimitrios A. Kourtis, is a PhD candidate Aristotle University, Research Associate, Adjunct Lecturer, University of Nicosia.] Photo credits: Flickr, z@doune, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic. The Armenian Remembrance Day (24 April) marks the commemoration of the tragic events that took place against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The persecutions, massacres, forceful deportations, and attempts to terrorize the Ottoman Armenian communities have...
[John Quigley is Professor Emeritus at the Moritz College of Law of The Ohio State University.] Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons The recent violence in Israel/Palestine highlights the need to resolve the underlying issues that have kept generated turmoil for a century. The unresolved issue of Arabs displaced in 1948 is at the top of the list of such issues. The urgency of...
Events Discussion Group: Legal Pluralism, Voluntary Compliance, and Universal International Law: Join the SLS International Law Section to discuss legal pluralism in international law with Dr Julie Fraser (Assistant Professor at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) and the Montaigne Centre at Utrecht University). Julie will discuss the incorporation of local norms, using Islamic law as an example, and how we...