Every scholar, from the most junior to the most senior, has a horror story about the languorous pace of academic publishing. The journal that took six months to reject their article. The journal that took six months to ask them to revise and resubmit their article and then took another six months to reject the revisions. The journal that accepted...
When Telford Taylor was planning the trial programme for the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs), he was faced with a dilemma concerning the Nazis' pre-war mistreatment -- legal and physical -- of Jews and members of other despised groups. Unlike the London Charter, Control Council Law No. 10, the NMTs' enabling statute, did not require crimes against humanity to be committed...
[Santiago Vargas Niño is a Legal Officer at the Tribunal for Peace of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, Colombia. He is formerly an intern, legal assistant, and assistant legal officer of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.] On 16...
Announcements Book launch on René Provost, Rebel Courts – The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents (Oxford UP 2021) organised by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights on 1 December 2021 at 11h30-13h00 EST on Zoom: The new book Rebel Courts by Professor René Provost (McGill University) discusses the administration of justice by armed groups. Based on extensive fieldwork, it offers a...
[Chris Carpenter is a lawyer and researcher in international law. She holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a master’s in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge.] The fundamental goal of a fair trial—at least in theory—is the discovery of truth, and the finding of a verdict on the basis of that truth. But...
[Nada Kiswanson has represented Afghan victims in proceedings before the International Criminal Court in the Situation in Afghanistan since 2019.] On 27 September 2021, Prosecutor Karim A. Khan decided to focus “investigations in Afghanistan on crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State – Khorasan Province ("IS-K") and to deprioritise other aspects of this investigation” (“Deprioritisation Decision”). Extraordinarily, he did not identify the “other...
[Kritika Sharma is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law and is writing her PhD in International Criminal Law and International Institutional Law at Leiden University.] Decisions taken by the International Criminal Court (ICC) as well as its international judicial governance institution or ‘injugovin’ the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), have been...
To our readers, I begin with an apology. While we launched the call for submissions for this vital symposium some months ago, a combination of technical and personal events prevented us from taking it forward on schedule. On the personal front, I left the UWI and took up a post at UCL. This precipitated the technical issue: I was unaware...
Events Chile Eboe-Osuji on Immunity Before the ICC: Please join us for the third annual International Law and Global Justice Lecture at the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario. Former President of the International Criminal Court, Chile Eboe-Osuji, will present ‘Immunity before International Courts: How There Never Was’ via Zoom webinar on November 9th from 12:30–2:00 pm. Dr. Eboe-Osuji will discuss the debate around whether heads of...
Part I set out the fundamentals of the debate, explaining that a key part of the contextualist critique of Orford’s view of legal history centres on the difference between doing history of international law and using history in international law. This is where the two sides get stuck, because Orford presents the TWAIL critique as “correctives to problems with earlier...
I am a big fan of Başak Etkin and Kostia Gorobets’ Borderline Jurisprudence podcast. I am also very interested in the intersection between law and history. Since Borderline Jurisprudence’s latest episode featured a discussion with Anne Orford on her latest book, International Law & the Politics of History(hereinafter ILPH), I could not resist to offer some comments. Anne Orford is, without a doubt, one of...
[Timothy Fish Hodgson is a legal adviser for the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), based in Johannesburg. Onen Cylus is a junior legal researcher for the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), based in Kampala, Uganda.] The scramble for access to COVID-19 vaccines has brought public attention to the significant impact that intellectual property (IP) protections can have on the right to...