Kosovo-Serbia Agreement on the Normalisation of Relations: Not Signed but Binding, Not Formally on Recognition but with Clear Elements of Implicit Recognition

[Kushtrim Istrefi is assistant professor of international law and human rights at Utrecht University, substitute member of the Venice Commission, and senior peace fellow with the Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG).] Philip Allot once said that an international agreement “is a disagreement reduced to writing… Parties to an international agreement enter into negotiation with different ideas of what they...

Dr Mohsen al Attar and Dr Rafael Quintero Godínez** Modern legal education has been criticised for trying to make itself harmless. Law professors provide students with a sanitised view of the field that camouflages the cracks and contradictions on offer. This approach leads to the circulation of parochial knowledge that overlooks the nuances of the societies we inhabit and the struggles...

[Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul is a journalist and executive director of Defensores de la Democracia, a Mexican nonprofit focused on preventing violence against journalists via memory-building and new narratives for social change.] With 14 journalists killed in Mexico in 2022, the country sustained its place as the world’s deadliest for media workers, even surpassing countries at war, like Ukraine or Yemen, according...

[Stephen Rapp is a former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice and former international prosecutor at Rwanda and Sierra Leone tribunals.] The Court of the Citizens of the World’ - a peoples tribunal - was organized by the Cinema for Peace Foundation, relating to the crime of aggression in Ukraine. The tribunal considered charges brought against Vladimir Putin for the crime...

Growing up in Lima, I heard the mythologized story of Columbus “discovering” America (the continent, sorry US) a million times: In a leap of faith, Queen Isabel of Spain sold her Crown jewels to finance a daring explorer’s expedition to unknown lands. Nobody believed in him, but Columbus persevered, proving everyone wrong and discovering a land no one else knew about, on three little caravels,...

[Dr Silvia Behrendt is currently director of the Global Health Responsibility Agency (GHRA), Salzburg, Austria. She holds a PhD on the International Health Regulations from the University of St. Gallen/Georgetown University Law Center, Washington D.C. and was formerly legal consultant to the IHR Secretariat at WHO. Dr Amrei Müller is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer (Ad Astra Fellow) at University College Dublin, Sutherland School of Law. She holds...

[Ríán Derrig is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the WMU-Sasakawa Global Ocean Institute of the World Maritime University.Arnulf Becker Lorca is Research Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso and Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School.] This two-part post is the text of a memorandum prepared for delegates in advance of the resumption of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Conference on an...

[Ríán Derrig is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the WMU-Sasakawa Global Ocean Institute of the World Maritime University.Arnulf Becker Lorca is Research Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso and Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School.] This two-part post is the text of a memorandum prepared for delegates in advance of the resumption of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Conference on an...

[Tania Ixchel Atilano, born in Mexico City, has a Juris Doctor from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests lie in the fields of history of international humanitarian law, international criminal law and criminal law. The author kindly thanks Professor Vivianne Weng for her invaluable feedback and comments.] Due to copyright issues, the images discussed have not been reproduced here. A link...

A few days ago, the European Law Institute published its final report on ecocide. The report not only provides a definition of ecocide, it also contains Model Rules for an EU Directive and a Council Decision that ELI hopes will both "contribute to the inter-institutional negotiations in the EU on the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and...

[Saparya Sood is a doctoral research fellow 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.] A New Dawn in BHR Discourse Business and Human Rights (BHR) discourse has become increasingly...