Public International Law

[Priya Pillai is an international lawyer, head of the Asia Justice Coalition secretariat, and a contributing editor at Opinio Juris.] It has been three years since the forced exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar was at its zenith, as a result of international crimes committed in Rakhine state. With close to a million individuals forced to flee to Bangladesh and other...

[Mona Ali Khalil is the Director of MAK LAW INTERNATIONAL; an Affiliate of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict; and a former Senior Legal Officer of the United Nations. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in international relations from Harvard University as well as a M.S. in Foreign Service and a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown...

[Dr. Mohamed S. Helal is an Associate Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, and is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.] Introduction: This blogpost is partially cathartic. Since last year, I’ve been on leave from academia to serve as a counsel on international law with the Egyptian foreign service. During that...

[Dapo Akande, Antonio Coco, Talita de Souza Dias, Duncan B. Hollis, Harold Hongju Koh, James C. O’Brien and Tsvetelina van Benthem.] The alarming spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic—now infecting nearly 19 million and claiming more than 700,000 lives worldwide—has made it increasingly urgent to define international law protections for the health care sector against malicious cyber operations. In May 2020, malicious cyberattacks on...

[Tarcisio Gazzini is Professor of international law at the University of East Anglia and visiting professor at the University of Trento and the Geneva Academy of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.] The 2015 Indian Model Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) (hereinafter “Model”) contains a number of important provisions addressing the main concerns raised about investment law and may be expected not only to serve in the negotiations of BITs...

[Nathaniel Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture at Brown University.] The Land between the River and the Sea, the land that cannot even be named without provoking heated controversy, has once again moved to the forefront of international debate. There are many possible explanations for this upsurge: perhaps the “Trump Plan,” perhaps Israeli threats...

The Gambia initiated legal proceedings in the United States a few months ago against Facebook, in order to compel the company to hand over information related to its ongoing case against Myanmar, relating to the Rohingya, before the International Court of Justice.  This legal strategy is in accordance with a provision of U.S. law - §1782 of the U.S. Code, a federal statute which permits the compelling of testimony,...

[Clare Brown is an Australian lawyer and Deputy Director of Victim Advocates International, based in Beirut.] On 28 July, CNN published an expose detailing the abuse of numerous Kenyan women by the Kenyan Consulate in Beirut, Lebanon. The women alleged that the Consulate had stolen money from them, physically assaulted them, and attempted to coerce them to perform sex work. The accusations, though alarming, are not...

[Craig D. Gaver has practiced law in Washington, DC and the Arabian/Persian Gulf. He recently received the LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School. The views expressed herein are solely his own.] Civil aviation lies at the center of the Gulf dispute. Upon the break in relations on 5 June 2017, Saudi Arabia closed Qatar’s only land border (and later threatened to...

[Bruno Gelinas-Faucher is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the content and implementation of State Responsibility towards non-state actors.] On 29 June, the UN Secretary-General officially launched the election season at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by announcing the candidates running to fill the next vacancies in 2021....

[Rachel López is an associate professor of law at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.] Gravity is a concept that is frequently invoked in international spaces,...

[Tasha Manoranjan, Esq. is the Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The views expressed here are PEARL's and do not represent the Commission's. Meruba Sivaselvachandran is a rising second-year student in the JD/MBA program at University of Toronto and a Legal Intern at PEARL.] Introduction The...