Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Nigeria has closed its northern border with Cameroon to block the movement of Boko Haram members who use the area as a launch-pad for attacks. French troops may stay much longer than originally planned in the Central African Republic. Civilians in South Sudan have been the main target of...
Weekend again, time for a roundup of the blog! This week, Rogier Bartels provided a guest post in two parts on the temporal scope of application of IHL, asking when a non-international armed conflict ends. Chris followed the situation in Ukraine closely with a post on the background of the conflict and the country's long road to stability. He also wrote...
The recent altercation between members of Pussy Riot and Cossack militia that was caught on video is a red flag signalling a broader issue in the Russian Federation: the resurgent power of the Cossacks and their relation to the Russian state, especially to keep politically-disfavored groups in check. But who are the Cossacks? A paramilitary organization? A political party? An ethnic...
The BBC is reporting that dozens of people have died today in new fighting between police and protestors in Ukraine. For a background to what is underlying the protests, see these posts concerning the struggle over the norms that will define Ukraine, how Ukraine's domestic disputes interact with Russian and European regional strategies, and the significance of the eastward spread...
[Rogier Bartels is a Legal Officer (Chambers) at the International Criminal Court and a research-fellow at the Netherlands Defence Academy. The views below are the author’s alone.] The first part of this post discussed that a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) ends when the NIAC-criteria (a certain level of organisation of the parties groups, and a certain intensity of the armed violence)...
I rarely get excited about a new book before I've read it -- but I'm excited about this one, Mark Lewis's The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950. Here is OUP's description: The Birth of the New Justice is a history of the attempts to instate ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international...
[Rogier Bartels is a Legal Officer (Chambers) at the International Criminal Court and a research-fellow at the Netherlands Defence Academy. The below post discusses an argument made at a conference organised by the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies in June 2012, that is expanded on in a chapter in the forthcoming book Jus Post Bellum (edited by Carsten Stahn et...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa At least 90 people have been killed in Nigeria's northeastern Borno state by suspected members of Boko Haram. The EU and West Africa have reached a compromise on an Economic Partnership Agreement, following over a decade of negotiations. Asia North and South Korea have agreed in a rare high-level meeting...
The heavy dumping of snow on the US East Coast made for a light dusting of posts this week. Kevin found the ICTR's recent acquittal of Augustin Ndindiliyimana after 11 years of pre-trial detention a stain on the tribunal's reputation. He also was not convinced by Eugene Kontorovich's use of Belgium's extension of the right to die to terminally ill minors as...
Eugene has graciously responded to my earlier post; you can find his new post here. It's well worth a read. I just want to offer a few thoughts on Eugene's response, because I think it fails to address the core of my critique: that it is incorrect to claim, as Eugene did in his first post, that Europe's opposition to the...
I'm currently in Belgium, teaching an intensive course on international criminal law at Katholieke University Leuven. So I was struck by Eugene Kontorovich's most recent post at the Volokh Conspiracy, in which he uses a new Belgian law permitting euthanasia for minors to criticize the Supreme Court's abolition of the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons. Here is the crux of...
Although the ICTY's recent high-profile acquittals have been getting all the attention, it's worth noting that the ICTR Appeals Chamber has just acquitted two high-ranking defendants, Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the former chief of staff of the Rwandan paramilitary police, and François-Xavier Nzuwonemeye, the former commander of a military reconnaissance battalion, on the ground that the Trial Chamber erred in concluding that they...
