[Hanan Salah is the Senior Libya and Mauritania Researcher at Human Rights Watch. This is the latest post in our symposium with Justice in Conflict on Libya and International Justice.] The scars ran deep. His back was a maze of thick welts, thinner scars and parts that resembled small craters. His wrists and ankles were raw from where he’d been shackled and suspended from a...
[Gabor Rona is a Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, where he directs the Law and Armed Conflict Project.] “I’m so glad we’ll never have to come back here again,” I stage whispered to my colleagues from Amnesty International, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, as we watched the inauguration of Barack Obama on the CNN feed. We were...
[Kate Vigneswaran is a Senior Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Programme, and Vito Todeschini is an Associate Legal Adviser, International Commission of Jurists, MENA Programme. This is the latest post in our symposium with Justice in Conflict on Libya and International Justice. Marieke Wierda’s contribution to the symposium has gone up at JiC and you can...
[Mary Fitzgerald is an independent researcher specializing in Libya. She has worked on Libya since February 2011 and lived there in 2014. She is a contributing author to The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath published by Hurst/OUP.] When Libyans took to the streets in early 2011 demanding change, one of their key demands was justice. Four decades of Gaddafi’s experiment in...
[Mark Kersten is a consultant for the Wayamo Foundation and a law student at McGill University. He is also author of the book, 'Justice in Conflict - The Effects of the International Criminal Court's Interventions on Ending Wars and Building Peace'.] It isn’t for a lack of attention. Violence in Libya is covered almost daily in major newspapers and media outlets....
Vito Todeschini is an Associate Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists’ MENA Programme. Said Benarbia is the International Commission of Jurists’ MENA Programme Director. In a UN Security Council Open Debate on the Middle East held on 23 July 2019, Jason D. Greenblatt, Assistant to the US President and Special Representative for International Negotiations, intervened to clarify the US Government’s position in...
[Demetra Loizou is a Lecturer in International Law and Legal Skills at the University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus.] Article 8 of the Rome Statute, which sets out the war crimes within the ICC’s jurisdiction, is inextricably linked to the general IHL regime. Paragraph 2(a) refers to the grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (international armed conflicts). Paragraph 2(c) is concerned with the serious violations of Common Article 3 (CA3)...
[Michael W.R. Adams is a J.S.D. candidate at Columbia Law School.] Increasingly, states across Europe and in the Commonwealth of Nations have adopted laws permitting the ‘denationalization’, or stripping of citizenship, from so-called ‘foreign fighters’ in the interests of national security. Denationalization has antecedents going back to the states of the ancient world. States have historically employed denationalization as a response to...
[Camila Teran is a lawyer with a LLB in Law and a LLM in International Criminal Law, both from the University of Sussex.] The ICC’s current crisis bears witness to the contentious relationship between the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC (OTP) and States. The OTP’s progress is further frustrated by the small window triggering the admissibility phase that would allow the Prosecutor to formally investigate Colombia....
I have uploaded a new article on the crime of aggression to SSRN. Here is the abstract: Immediately after the historic adoption of the aggression amendments on 14 December 2017, a number of participants in the negotiations expressed their belief that activating the crime of aggression would help deter states from engaging in the illegal use of force. Unfortunately, the version...
[Alexander Gilder is a PhD Researcher at The City Law School, City, University of London. From September he will be a Lecturer in Law at Royal Holloway, University of London.] In recent years UN peace operations have begun to explicitly seek so-called ‘stabilization’. In 2015 the Report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) suggested the Security Council give clarification to how the UN interprets ‘stabilization’....
[Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore where he heads the Transsystemic Law Cluster. He is also an Associate Fellow of NUS Law. This is the second part of a two-part post.] Recognition of Palestine’s Statehood Since 1988, 138 states (72 per cent of UN members) have recognised a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel on 4 June 1967. The...