In association with the International Commission of Jurists

At Long Last: The International Criminal Court Strikes in the Central African Republic

19 Nov

[Patryk I. Labuda is a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University School of Law.] News broke on Saturday, November 17, that the Central African Republic (CAR) had transferred Alfred Yekatom, alias ‘Rombot’ or ‘Rambo’, to the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to the arrest warrant, Yekatom has been charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes for acts allegedly committed...

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14 Nov

[Christian Marxsen is head of the Max Planck Research Group “Shades of Illegality in International Peace and Security Law” at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.] Jutta Brunnée has offered us a very sharp analysis of the current challenges to international law. While I largely subscribe to her argument, I would like to...

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14 Nov

[Ajita Banerjie is a research consultant with the International Commission of Jurists, based in India.] In a historic judgment pronounced on 6th September 2018, the Supreme Court of India declared the 157-year-old law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, unconstitutional in so far as it criminalizes consensual sexual relationships between same-sex adults. The landmark judgment in Navtej Singh Johar vs Union of India seeks to atone for...

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12 Nov

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD cand. (Intl Law) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Fellow of the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation.] The purpose of the present post is to briefly discuss certain arguments, based on the 1953 London Agreement and the 1990 Two-Plus-Four Treaty, asserted by Germany on different occasions aiming at the dismissal of the legal validity...

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09 Nov

[Beatrice Lindstrom is the Legal Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti and was counsel to plaintiffs in the Haiti cholera litigation Georges v. United Nations.] Last week’s Supreme Court argument in Jam v. International Finance Corporation addressed whether international organizations’ immunity under the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA) has evolved with foreign sovereign immunity over the last...

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09 Nov

[Eugénie Mérieau is a legal consultant for the International Commission of Jurists.] In September 2018, the Indian Supreme Court invalidated, in two landmark rulings, misogynistic and homophobic laws inherited from the British Empire. On September 27, it struck down Section 497 of the Penal Code (Shine v. Union of India) criminalizing adultery, three weeks after it had annulled Art. 377 of...

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08 Nov

As evidenced in Part I, Latin American states have not been keen to allow expansive interpretations of the rules for use force in foreign soil. Latin America is a region historically subjected to foreign intervention, and as such, the rules it designed, especially in the pre-Charter era, were always very much thought out from a perspective of protecting “the invaded”,...

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07 Nov

Ever since its very first articulations, the “unwilling or unable test” has relied heavily in the time-tested legitimacy of the 1837 Caroline Affair, where British forces sunk a vessel manned by Canadian rebels in American territory. Dressing such a visible and well-known case in the cloth of “unwilling or unable” allows its proponents to argue that its underlying principles have...

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30 Oct

[Renata Nagamine is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.] On October 28th, 2018, Brazilians chose their president for the next 4 years. The running candidates were Universidade de São Paulo Professor Fernando Haddad and Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a congressman in his 7th mandate who emerged as a prominent extreme-right figure during the impeachment of former President Dilma...

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25 Oct

[Massimo Frigo is a Senior International Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists.] 2018 continues to be a year marked by fierce disputes with regard to asylum, including what it is and what the obligations States have towards refugees or others entitled to international protection. More recently, Venezuela has been another example of the fact that a refugee crisis may...

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24 Oct

[Frédéric Mégret is an Associate Professor of Law at McGill University Faculty of Law.] On the 26th September, a group of diligent Haitian lawyers headed by human rights defender Patrice Florvilus requested an emergency injunction (“en référé”) before the Tribunal de Première Instance de Port-au-Prince against the State of Haiti, that would compel it to trigger the creation of the...

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24 Oct

[Niloufar Omidi is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway.] On 3rd October 2018, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its order on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by Iran in the case regarding alleged violations of the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights between Iran and the United States...

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