[Massimo Frigo is a Senior Legal Adviser of the International Commission of Jurist’s Europe and Central Asia Programme.] On 25 May 2021, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark ruling on the compatibility of systems of mass surveillance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the essential elements of which were first brought to public light...
[Giovanni Mantilla is University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and is the author of Lawmaking under Pressure: International Humanitarian law and Internal Armed Conflict.] I am humbled by the generous comments of nine excellent readers of my book, Lawmaking under Pressure. Having worked on...
Alas, we are losing our wonderful Editorial Assistant, Parisa Zangeneh, who needs to focus on her PhD at NUI-Galway. Parisa has been an incredible asset to Opinio Juris as an editor and in terms of her own blogging. (See here for an example of the latter.) She will be much missed, though she will maintain her blogging rights and we...
Over at Armed Groups and International Law, Alonso Gurmendi has published his contribution. Check it out here! Alonso Gurmendi is an Assistant Professor at Universidad del Pacífico, in Lima, Peru, where he specializes in international humanitarian law and use of force, with a focus on the history of international law. Currently, he is also a PhD candidate at University College London (UCL). ...
The past few days have been dominated by the horrible images of destruction coming out of Palestine. As is painfully visible to anyone with an internet connection, Israel has been targeting residential and commercial buildings in Gaza under the argument that they are used by Hamas militants. As one tweet by the Israeli Defence Forces put it, according to Israel,...
Call for Papers Call for papers on “The Potential of Public Interest Litigation in International Law”: As there is growing interest in using international courts in the public interest, this project, funded by the University of Exeter and the University of Geneva, aims at analysing what challenges lie ahead and how to overcome them. In order to tackle these questions, the organisers...
Call for Papers Cyprus Human Rights Law Review Call for Papers on special issue: COVID- 19: The Protection of Human Rights in the Pandemic Era: Challenges and Responses: The COVID-19 ongoing crisis has been characterised by the introduction of strict and far-reaching governmental measures restricting fundamental rights to an unprecedented extent for western post-World War II democracies. The Cyprus Human Rights Law...
Dr Mohsen al Attar & Dr Henrique Weil Afonso Crises are common to contemporary global society. The reasons are plentiful including the perilousness of denationalised production, the over-exploitation of resources, and, perhaps foremost, the intensification of social inequalities precipitated by both of the former. Each of these exacerbates individual precarity and collective vulnerability. As precarity and vulnerability swell, constituencies lose faith...
International law has famously “turned to history”. Since then, what I like to call the “foundational myth” of international law has been poked, prodded, re-evaluated and re-told in powerful, unsettling and insightful ways. The publicist’s relation with their own discipline is no longer the same, and the colonial, often violent, roots of the rules we rely on every day, are increasingly more exposed and open...
Few international economic lawyers doubt the value of foreign direct investment (FDI). There is even some consensus that FDI plays a vital role in fostering development in host states. It triggers technology expansion, assists human capital formation, and nurtures a dynamic business environment. States—especially across the Third World—appeal to investors in the hopes of attracting a share of the green gold. Although there is truth to...
Events European Court of Human Rights’ Webinar on ‘Human Punishment: Life Imprisonment and the Right to Hope’: The Criminal Law Group of the European Court of Human Rights, in cooperation with the University of Bologna, Liverpool John Moores University and ‘Beyond Detention’ Interest Group is convening a series of webinars on the broader theme of ‘Punishment, Detention, Crisis: Academic Judicial Dialogues’. The...
Asser Khattab is a Research and Communications Officer and Vito Todeschini a Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists, Middle East and North Africa Programme. On 15 March 2011, dozens of Syrians took to the street in the busy center of the country’s capital, Damascus, to protest against decades of repression, human rights violations and authoritarian rule by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Syria’s...