Public International Law

[Richard Dicker was the longtime international justice director and is now a senior legal adviser for advocacy at Human Rights Watch. He teaches courses on international criminal courts at Columbia Law School.] Goitom, a 42-year-old ethnic Tigrayan farmer, living in that northern region of Ethiopia, watched helplessly when, on January 17, 2021, Amhara Special Forces – a brutal paramilitary group - beat up and detained Tigrayan men...

[Patricia Vella de Fremeaux is Professor and Head of the International Law Department of the Faculty of Laws, University of Malta. Dr Felicity G. Attard is a lecturer in the Department of International Law at the University of Malta.] In Part One, an overview of the Pact was examined in order to set the context for the following discussion on...

[Patricia Vella de Fremeaux is Professor and Head of the International Law Department of the Faculty of Laws, University of Malta. Dr Felicity G. Attard is a lecturer in the Department of International Law at the University of Malta.] The problem of maritime migration has been at the forefront of the European Union (EU)’s legislative and policy making landscape for decades. The...

[Thomas Skouteris is Associate Professor and Chair of the Law Department at The American University in Cairo. He is also Director of the Access to Knowledge Foundation and Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School.] International law finds itself yet again in a profound crisis—perhaps even a breaking point. The ongoing wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa, and across numerous other locations do not...

[Giovanna M. Frisso is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Lincoln] The colonial aspects of international criminal law have been extensively debated in scholarly literature (see here, here, here and here). Socio-economic and cultural rights, along with discriminatory practices, have either been excluded or only partially addressed within the international criminal law framework. Additionally, international structures tied to resource extraction...

[Rocío Lorca is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the University of Chile Law School] The papers in the recent ‘After Critique’ symposium move between critique and possibility regarding the role of international criminal law as an instrument of justice. Natalie Hodgson, for example, gives us good reasons to value international criminal law. Not as a grandiose mechanism that will deliver on the promise of...

[Sophie Rigney is a Senior Lecturer in Law at RMIT University and author of Fairness and Rights in International Criminal Procedure] In the northern summer of 2020, up to 26 million people took to the streets in the United States to protest the murder of George Floyd by city police, and police violence and carceralism generally. These were the largest protests in U.S. history. Others...

[Daniel Bertram is a PhD candidate at the Department of Law, European University Institute. George Hill holds an LLM from the Department of Law, European University Institute and currently works as a researcher in London.] “International criminal law is dead, long live international criminal law!” There is an almost schizophrenic air to much contemporary discourse about the role of international criminal law (ICL) in...

Sarah Zarmsky is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre with a focus on international law and new and emerging technologies. In 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. As an understatement, online harms have been rampant in the contexts of the ongoing conflicts in...

[Dr Natalie Hodgson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Law at the University of Nottingham.] On 5 March 2024, news emerged that Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, had been named in an Article 15 communication to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging that he was ‘an accessory to genocide in Gaza’. The communication, prepared by Australian law firm Birchgrove Legal, argued that ‘members of the...

[Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is Professor of International Law and Governance at the University of Edinburg and Adjunct Professor at IE Law School. Barrie Sander (@Barrie_Sander) is Assistant Professor of International Justice at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs.] As contemporary international criminal law (ICL) enters its fourth decade, carceral internationalism has become normalised within the international community to a degree few thought imaginable. Such...

[Roberta Chardulo Andrade, PhD, is a T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Penn State College of Medicine, and she is interested in topics that lie at the intersection of international law, international relations, and planetary health.] [Funding statement: This publication was supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as...