Public International Law

[José Manuel Barreto works on decolonizing human rights and international law based on TWAIL and Decolonial Theory. He teaches law at the Javeriana University in Bogotá and will publish ‘Decolonial Theory and the History of Human Rights’ in 2025.] The Palestinian genocide has unveiled the deep colonial structure of the international legal order. The so-called Westphalian system has been inveterately depicted...

[George Bisharat is an Emeritus Professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East for both academic and general audiences. He is currently leading an international comparative research project examining the role of private violence in settler colonial societies.] Three cases related to Palestine have been before...

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...

September 2024 António GuterresSecretary-GeneralUnited NationsNew York, NY 10017United States Dear Secretary-General, We are writing to urge the United Nations to initiate a comprehensive global study on apartheid practices and to affirm an inclusive understanding of victims protected from the crime of apartheid. UN experts are increasingly pointing to apartheid practices and policies in different regions of the world, for example, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Myanmar, Afghanistan and North Korea. In light...

[Emily Mullin is a legal intern and lead of the Ukraine Advocacy Initiative atGenocide Watch.] [Dr. Gregory Stanton is the founder and president of Genocide Watch and the Chair of the Alliance Against Genocide.] Overview Since Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, international lawyers have discussed creation of a Special Tribunal for the crime of aggression. Philippe Sands proposed the idea in the Financial Times just four...

[Tatjana Grote is a PhD Candidate at the University of Essex] Once again, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, ‘the Court’) has made its way into the headlines of the world. In its recent Advisory Opinion on ‘Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem’, the Court left no doubt that...

[Jens Iverson is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Leiden University.] Mongolia is obliged by its treaty obligations to arrest Vladimir Putin if it can.  It could have, but it didn’t.  Why?  The answer lies mainly in politics, but also in the cover created by an academic dispute.  This post attempts to explain the dispute to those who haven’t been following it, and also seeks...

[Hussein Badreddine is a Ph.D. Candidate in Public International Law at the University of New South Wales, Canberra] Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah and Israel have been engaging in a low-level armed conflict. This conflict has however been intensifying, and further talks about an imminent ground invasion of Lebanon by Israel are on the rise. A previous conflict between Hezbollah and...

[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...