Events and Announcements: 15 August 2021

Call for Papers Business Human Rights Conference: The IFIM Law School is organising a Research Colloquium on the theme of 'Business and Human Rights', on 23 October 2021. Early career scholars, PhD candidates, post-graduate students and under- graduate students are encouraged to submit an abstract (300 words) of their works to lawreview@ifim.edu.in by 25th August 2021. Selected abstracts will  be notified by...

Mathilde Laronche is the Research and Advocacy Officer and Sophie Rickard is the Programme Manager at the International Commission of Jurists' Middle East and North Africa Programme. A whole year has passed since the devastating Beirut port blast on 4 August 2020, and yet, the victims, their families and the Lebanese people are still waiting for truth and justice.  The investigation promised by the Lebanese...

Rocío Quintero, Timothy Fish Hodgson and Young Park work at the International Commission of Jurists. This symposium consists of a series of posts authored by the different panelists of a webinar hosted by the International Commission of Jurists titled “COVID-19 and Courts: A Global Trend of Judicial Deference?“ On 11 May 2021, the Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca in Colombia ordered  the Colombian Government to...

Manish Kumar Shrestha is an advocate and PhD candidate at the Nepal Law Campus in Nepal. This symposium consists of a series of blogs authored by the different panelists of a webinar hosted by the International Commission of Jurists titled “COVID-19 and Courts: A Global Trend of Judicial Deference?“ Responding to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nepal announced a nationwide lockdown from 24...

Michael Karnavas is a criminal-defence attorney and former President of the Association of Defence Counsel of the ICTY. He currently represents Paul Gicheru at the ICC. This post first appeared on his personal blog. … man has consciously and unconsciously inflicted irreparable damage to the environment in times of war and peace.   Richard A. Falk, 1973 And will continue to inflict irreparable...

[Carlos A. Cruz Carrillo is a PhD Candidate at the University of Basel. Twitter: @Carcru1118.] The rule of law for oceans faces the challenges presented by climate change. Scientific evidence shows that climate change is causing menacing issues in the oceans. For example, sea-level rise, acidification, and deoxygenation of the oceans, amongst others. (see: 2019 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate). In...

Despite the publication of the MMIWG Report and its findings of an ongoing “race-based genocide” against Canada’s First Nations, issues of indigenous genocide and (neo)colonial oppression have remained side-lined from political discourse in the rest of the American continent. In fact, the situation has arguably worsened: at the same time as Canada protested the unmarked graves of hundreds of indigenous...

[Valerie Oosterveld is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario (Western University) Faculty of Law in Canada and a faculty member with her university’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, also known as Western Space. Anne Campbell is a recent graduate of Western University and a current Western Space summer intern.] Plans for the extraction of water and minerals in outer space – particularly...

Young Park is a JD Candidate and International Law and Human Rights Fellow at New York University School of Law. Currently she is an intern at the International Commission of Jurists, Africa Regional Programme.Onen Cylus is an LLB finalist at Makerere University. He is also currently working as an intern with the International Commission of Jurists, with a passion for...

[Iain Scobbie is the Chair in International Law at the University of Manchester. This post is a contribution in our recent symposium on Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law.] The understanding and implications of common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions have undergone a transformation since its inception.  The volume edited by Eve Massingham and Annabel McConnachie, ‘Ensuring Respect for...

In my previous posts on the crime of ecocide -- Post 1, Post 2 -- I argued the theoretical/normative case against the IEP's decision to subject lawful acts to anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis via the "wantonness" requirement. In this post, I want to bracket the issue of whether the definition of ecocide should distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts and question...

I have been eagerly awaiting the results of the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide (IEP), which includes a number of excellent lawyers and some close friends. The exercise has always been largely symbolic: even if 2/3 of states parties are willing to support an ecocide amendment, which is unlikely, an amendment to Art. 5 of the...