In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Courts & Tribunals

06 Nov

[Siddharth Narrain is a lawyer and legal researcher based in Delhi.] Earlier this year, a five-judge Constitutional Bench of the Indian Supreme Court, in a path-breaking judgment in Navtej Singh Johar declared the colonial sodomy statute (Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) unconstitutional, and no longer applicable to consenting sexual acts between adults, effectively decriminalizing homosexuality, and legally recognizing LGBTI...

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25 Oct

[Massimo Frigo is a Senior International Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists.] 2018 continues to be a year marked by fierce disputes with regard to asylum, including what it is and what the obligations States have towards refugees or others entitled to international protection. More recently, Venezuela has been another example of the fact that a refugee crisis may...

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24 Oct

[Niloufar Omidi is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway.] On 3rd October 2018, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its order on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by Iran in the case regarding alleged violations of the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights between Iran and the United States...

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18 Oct

This post is a continuation of the analysis of proceedings at the Philippine Supreme Court, relating to the withdrawal of the Philippines from the International Criminal Court. C. R.A. 9851: A Double Bind? The sufficiency of the “The Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity” or R.A. 9851 in addressing mass atrocity crimes was...

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18 Oct

The Philippine Supreme Court has just completed hearings in a legal challenge relating to the Philippine withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. On the heels of the South African High Court ruling against the withdrawal from the ICC on the grounds of unconstitutionality and thereby invalidatingthe withdrawal, this case in the Philippines bears watching. I attended the three days of hearings...

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16 Oct

[Victor Kattan is Senior Research Fellow of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore where he heads the Transsystemic Law Cluster. He is also an Associate Fellow of NUS Law and an associate (non-resident) member of Temple Garden Chambers in London.] Palestine’s Application Instituting Proceedings against the United States of America (U.S.) at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 28 September has produced much commentary in a short...

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15 Oct

[Matt Pollard is the Director of Center for Independence of Judges and Lawyers International Commission of Jurists.] "I was very emotional," writes Brett Kavanaugh. "I said a few things I should not have said." It is extraordinary that someone poised to be appointed to the highest court of a country should have felt it necessary to reaffirm his judicial qualities, and seek to...

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09 Oct

[Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School and Faculty Affiliate at the Handa Center for Human Rights & International Justice at Stanford University. Prior to returning to academia, she served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State.] Until very recently, the Trump...

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04 Oct

[Shaheed Fatima, Q.C., is is a London-based barrister, practicing from Blackstone Chambers.] In ‘The Trump Administration and International Law’ Professor Harold Hongju Koh diagnoses the multiple threats to domestic and international institutions and norms posed by the current administration’s foreign policy approach; prescribes a ‘political counterstrategy’ based on transnational legal process which may be applied by a range of players, with the...

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19 Sep

The International Commission of Jurists organised a fascinating side-event yesterday at the Human Rights Council. Here is the ICJ's background statement: Particularly when crimes under international law are perpetrated on a large scale in situations of crisis, there is an urgent need to preserve evidence for use in eventual criminal proceedings, whether at the International Criminal Court or other national or...

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10 Sep

Much has been made of how relations between the ICC have improved since the second term of Bush the Younger. I think we all expected that to change in the wake of Trump's election, particularly after the OTP announced its intention to investigate detention-related abuses in Afghanistan and in CIA black sites in Eastern Europe For a while, nothing much...

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