On June 24, 2023, members of the Wagner mercenary group staged an armed revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin and began an advance on Moscow that ended suddenly, after intervention and mediation by Belarusian President Lukashenko, on the same day. In this post, I present, analyse and systematise the statements and reactions of fifty-nine states. Before we start, let me...
[Kurt Mundorff is author of A Cultural Interpretation of the Genocide Convention and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Tennessee Knoxville Department of Political Science.] As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moved westward, so too did Russian officials who began removing Ukrainian children and transferring them to Russia, often parading the children on television as proof of their...
[Moritz Koenig obtained his PhD in law from SOAS, University of London and is currently working on a research project on the history of Dutch colonial law schools.] It has often been argued that international law and international legal scholarship are incapable of reforming themselves. David Kennedy has argued that supposed renewal in legal argument is usually simply a recycling of old ideas and...
[The Sex Worker Inclusive Feminist Alliance (SWIFA) was formed as part of a long-term strategy of building alliances across the sex workers’ rights and women’s rights movements to advance the acceptance of sex workers’ rights within the women’s movement and the core group of organisations in the alliance include: Amnesty International - International Secretariat, CREA, FEMNET, Global Alliance Against Traffic...
On the morning of June 6th, 2023, Ukraine accused Russia of destroying the Kakhovka Dam in the Dnieper River. A few hours later, during the afternoon on the same day, Russia blamed Ukraine for the destruction. Since then, I searched and collected statements by forty-nine other states addressing the destruction. This post analyses and systematises these forty-nine reactions in order to offer a clearer outlook...
[Matthew Gillett is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Essex Law School and a United Nations Special Mandate holder (Vice-Chair of Working Group on Arbitrary Detention), who previously prosecuted cases before the international courts. The views herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of any other person or organization. The author was...
Few emotions rival the existential horror a PhD candidate experiences when asked to justify their topic’s relevance to the discipline. Having adopted “Mass Media and International Law” as my banner, I’ve received a fair share of queries about “where’s the law”. Though the frequency of these challenges has decreased with our discipline’s recent gestures towards multi-disciplinarity, their persistence reflects the...
[Dr Koldo Casla (Twitter: @koldo_casla) is a Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at Essex Law School and Director of Essex Human Rights Centre Clinic, UK.] In the context of the current food and energy crisis, and the rising cost of living, it is essential to tackle the right to property directly, defining its content and shape in line with the...
[Carlos Lusverti is the Latin America Legal advisor with the International Commission of Jurists] The principle of presumption of innocence in criminal cases is core to the rule of law. It is also a universally recognized general principle of law, incorporated into general international human rights treaties, the Venezuelan Constitution and domestic law as part of the Criminal Proceedings Code. However,...
Ambassador Rein Tammsaar, Estonia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, has a new post at Just Security arguing in favour of a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression. He says many things I agree with, others that I don't. In this post, I want to address what the Ambassador says about the prospect of the General Assembly endorsing a...
[Dr Christine Schwöbel-Patel is Reader at Warwick Law School and Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies; she is currently based at the Humboldt University in Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow.] Dear Asad, Filip, and Mark, I’ll begin this letter, as so many letters begin, by apologising for its tardiness. Since you Mark and Asad sent your responses, many months...
[Filip Strandberg Hassellind is a doctoral candidate in International Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.] In Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law, Christine Schwöbel-Patel argues that “a global elite benefit from marketized global justice whilst those who tend to be the ‘faces’ of global injustice – particularly victims of conflict – are instrumentalized and ultimately commodified” [p. i]. The book directs...