General

[Nicolás Carrillo Santarelli is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and holds a PhD degree in international law and international relations from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Master’s degrees in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy from the University of Luxembourg and Human Rights from the University of Alcalá.] Perhaps it would be convenient to start this text by...

[Róisín Pillay is a supervisor and Ayşe Bingöl Demir is the director of the Turkey Human Rights Litigation Support Project, a Middlesex University School of Law–based initiative focused on strategic litigation, research, and advocacy] In a courtroom in Istanbul on 9 September, a trial will take place that may be all too emblematic of our times. Leaders of the Istanbul Bar...

[Mohammad Mishal is a graduate of the Advanced Master in European and international human rights law at Leiden University and has most recently worked as Academic Coordinator of the same programme] Introduction  In a 2021 article, Dapo Akande and Antonios Tazanakopoulos posit that when a state’s territory is occupied by an unlawful armed attack, the occupation continues the attack, allowing the injured state...

[Guy S Goodwin-Gill is Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford and Honorary Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney] Few if any of us will ever meet Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, or others of that ilk who have organised the aberrant architecture of genocide and encouraged the climate of death, maiming, starvation and destruction that is Gaza today. No independent...

[Christine Evans is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the law faculty of Lund University and a human rights practitioner/investigator who has worked for the UN. Nieves Molina is an international lawyer and former senior UN officer. She is writing in her own capacity.] This post argues that the current political situation requires urgent and critical reconsideration of the role that sanctions can...

[Kate McInnes is a Vancouver-based criminal defence lawyer and the Principal at Arendt Chambers, Canada's first and only law firm practicing exclusively in international human rights law and international justice] The creation of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (STCAU), a court embedded within the Council for Europe framework, marks a historic effort in securing accountability for...

[MohammadMehdi Seyed Nasseri is a researcher at the Center for Ethics and Law Studies and lecturer at Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran). He holds a PhD in public international law from Islamic Azad University, UAE Branch (Dubai).] Access to justice is one of the fundamental principles of the rule of law and a cornerstone in guaranteeing human rights, whose effective realization acquires...

[Theodore Hanna is an LL.M. candidate in International and European Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens] Introduction On 18 July 2025, the European Union adopted its eighteenth package of sanctions against Russia, one of its most robust to date, tightening measures on Russia’s energy, banking, and defense sectors. Uniquely, this package targets investor–State dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, a system that...

[Angel Cabrera is a Mexican human rights lawyer and an Assistant Professor of international law and human rights at the University of Washington Tacoma. He holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from the University of Guadalajara.] In a request submitted last December, Guatemala asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the “Court”) to issue an...

[Saparya Sood is a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (Bonn, Germany). She is a lawyer qualified in India and received her postgraduate degree in law and economics as a recipient of an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Views expressed are personal.] The European Commission recently introduced the Omnibus Package on 26 February 2025. While presented as...