In association with the International Commission of Jurists

National Security Law

05 Mar

[Janaha Selvaraj is a lecturer at the Department of Legal Studies of The Open University of Sri Lanka. She holds LL.B (Hons) from University of Colombo and LL.M in International Law from the South Asian University, New Delhi, India] Introduction Recent United States (US) military action against Venezuela raises familiar but unresolved questions about the prohibition on the use of force in international law....

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02 Mar

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law; Elke Schwarz is a Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University London; Ingvild Bode is a Professor of International Relations, University of Southern Denmark; Zena Assaad is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, Australian National University; and Neil Renic is a Lecturer...

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23 Feb

[Doniyor Mutalov is a Research Assistant at the Center for International Law and Governance, where he works with Professor Sebastián Mantilla Blanco. He holds an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University and was awarded the Leo Gross Prize for excellence in law studies] Facts On December 25, 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190 with...

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12 Feb

[The authors are third year law students at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata.] The UN Charter rests on a distinctive normative conception of sovereignty. Sovereignty is not abolished in matters of international peace and security; rather, it is collectively mediated through universality. Article 2(1) affirms the sovereign equality of states, grounding participation in peace and security governance in strictly juridical status....

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18 Dec

[Elke Schwarz is a professor of political theory at Queen Mary University London] The U.S. National Security Strategy is a strange document. Many have commented – favourable or disparagingly – on its brevity and its accessible language. The form of the document is a simple, 33-page delineation of ‘What America Wants’ and ‘How it Will get It.’ It is a policy...

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14 Dec

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law, an Executive Board Member of Airwars, and the Managing Editor of Opinio Juris.] In a New York Times essay published last week, Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense in President Barack Obama’s first term and Director of Homeland Security in his second, seeks...

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06 May

[Image by Freepik.] Introduction It is widely acknowledged that, without regulation, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) can contribute to violations of international law and benefit from impunity. Both corporate actors and States increasingly rely on PMSCs to secure their operations in high-risk areas—whether through direct contracts, in-house security arrangements, or outsourcing military and law enforcement functions. Numerous UN reports have documented...

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02 May

[Dr Henrique Marcos is a lecturer at the Foundations of Law Department, Faculty of Law Maastricht University] This text is inspired by the discussions held at the event “Whatever Happened to TikTok” organised by the Law & Popular Culture Network at Maastricht University Faculty of Law in February 2025. In this post, I discuss the recent ban and subsequent unbanning of TikTok...

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09 Apr

As I write these lines, the United States is fighting for the very soul of its democracy. Under dispute is whether their government can forcibly transfer a lawful resident – in this case a Latino with a tattoo – to a forced labour camp in El Salvador without any due process. For now, the US Supreme Court’s answer seems to be “no”, provided the...

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28 Jan

The inimitable Sam Moyn and I have a chapter on the Vietnam War and international law in the Cambridge History of the Vietnam War: Volume 3, Endings and Aftermaths, which was just published by Cambridge University Press. Here are the opening paragraphs: There have been thousands of histories of the Vietnam War, but none assigns a pivotal role to international law....

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