In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

03 Jul

[Danilo Ruggero Di Bella is a lawyer at Bottega Di Bella.] Upon overthrowing a dictatorship, the swift recovery of stolen assets hidden abroad by a dictator is a key concern for every newly established government. At times, a newly constituted government may rely on the voluntary cooperation of foreign state authorities in which stolen assets are located. In other instances, the newly established government may face difficulties...

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02 Jul

[Alejandra Muñoz is an International Legal Advisor with a Colombian lawyers' collective, ''Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo (CAJAR)'] In February this year, the long awaited first voluntary statement rendered by Colombian army general Mario Montoya Uribe before the country’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP) sparked a great deal of frustration and disappointment among victims. After refusing to speak entirely on the first day, his declarations on...

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30 Jun

[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer and Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She is completing her PhD on victim participation in international accountability mechanisms at the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology.] Introduction The recent article by Rawan Arraf, director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, ‘Without genuine war crime investigations, Australians could end up in the Hague’ states that unless authorities conducted a...

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30 Jun

[John B. Quigley is Emeritus Professor of Law at Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.] The annexation, now under consideration by Israel, of land in occupied Palestine is aimed, in part, at bringing many of Israel’s settlements into the territory of Israel. Annexation, however, may bring the unintended consequence of the loss of those very settlements. Much of the land on which the...

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29 Jun

Karolina Babicka is a Legal Adviser with the Europe and Central Asia Programme of the International Commission of Jurists, in Brussels Since January 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic has been spreading in Europe. As a result, all EU Member States have taken measures with the stated intention of containing the spread of the virus. These included restrictions on public gatherings, requirements to stay at home...

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29 Jun

[Srinivas Burra is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Legal Studies at South Asian University, New Delhi; Haris Jamil is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at University of Delhi, New Delhi.] On 15 June 2020, there was a violent face-off in the Galwan valley, in the western sector of the China-India border. Soldiers from China and India scuffled at the border, which led to...

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26 Jun

Luca Ferro is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on International ‘Intervention’ in Theory and in Practice, assessing the legality of third-State involvement in the internal and external affairs of other States. Prematurely calling time of death on ‘negative equality’? On 5 and 6 December 2019, the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law (JUFIL) and the...

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26 Jun

[Marie Steinbrecher is currently a teaching fellow at UCL’s Department of Political Science while completing her PhD at Royal Holloway’s School of Law.] The Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) obliges State Parties to designate a National Preventive Mechanism (NPM). NPMs are mandated to visit all places of deprivation of liberty to prevent torture and ill-treatment. To date, 90 States have ratified OPCAT...

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26 Jun

[Aparajitha Narayanan currently works as a Legal Intern for the UNIRMCT and for Global Rights Compliance, The Hague. She holds an Adv. LL.M. in Public International Law from Leiden University (2019).] Introduction As a planet we are currently going through an unfortunate phase where the global order has taken a disruptive hit. Many believe that it is perhaps impossible to recover from this pandemic-created sinkhole, since COVID-19 has...

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25 Jun

[Dr. Alexander Heinze, LL.M. (TCD) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign and International Criminal Law, Institute for Criminal Law and Justice, Georg-August-University of Göttingen.] There are two ways an International(ised) Criminal Tribunal (ICT) can regulate the transmission of information in the proceedings: by combining a case file approach with a restrictive disclosure regime or by introducing extensive disclosure rules with no case file or one that merely...

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24 Jun

Miloon Kothari is President of UPR Info and the former UN Special Rapporteur on Housing. One of the defining features of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process have been the robust follow-up mechanisms that have emerged throughout the reporting cycles of the UPR. The reports prepared for the UPR, by governments, civil society, national human rights institutions and UN agencies, reveal a range of strategies...

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23 Jun

[Arron N. Honniball is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law (CIL), National University of Singapore, Singapore. Funding was provided to CIL by a Singapore Maritime Institute Grant (SMI-2019-MA-03).] Introduction Part I of this two-part post reviewed the M/V Wise Honest’s final voyage against the UNSC framework that prohibits such illicit trafficking by sea, followed by the rights and practice...

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