I wasn't feeling particularly well on my recent long flight from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam, so I took advantage of my sickness to binge watch all eight episodes of BBC2's international criminal justice drama, Black Earth Rising, which focuses on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I wasn't expecting much, because BER was billed as a drama about the ICC. But I was...
Cocaine is a big problem in Latin America. According to the UN, 99.5% of worldwide coca cultivation is concentrated in just three countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Under pressure from the Global North, Latin American nations have reduced the problem to a plan to contain cocaine flows through mostly violent means, to disastrous humanitarian consequences. In several states, violence has...
On Wednesday, a court in the UAE sentenced a PhD student at Durham University, Matthew Hedges, to life imprisonment for supposedly "spying" for the British government. There is no evidence to support the spying allegation, and both Hedges and the British government vociferously deny it. By all accounts, Hedges was simply in the UAE to research the country's foreign and...
[Mona Ali Khalil is an internationally recognized public international lawyer with 25 years of UN and other experience dealing with the rule of law and international peace and security efforts including peacekeeping, sanctions, disarmament and counterterrorism.] In the face of a veto by any permanent member of the UN Security Council blocking enforcement action against the mass atrocities in Palestine, Myanmar,...
Facebook commissioned a human rights impact assessment into its presence in Myanmar by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which has recently released its report. While news outlets reported this as a mea culpa by Facebook regarding the use of its platform in contributing to atrocities in Myanmar – perhaps partly due to the product policy manager’s note in disseminating the report...
Between 1980 and 2000, Peru went through what Peruvians call “La Época del Terrorismo”, or “The Era of Terrorism”. In those years, the Shining Path, a Maoist-inspired terrorist group, launched an attack on Peruvian democracy seeking to establish a Khmer-Rouge-like dictatorship. According to Peru’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission, its Supreme Court, and The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the “Era...
[Alina Balta is a PhD Researcher at Tilburg Law School, INTERVICT. This blogpost is a product of the Intervict Reparations Initiative, commissioned by the NWO-VIDI Project, A Waste of Time or No Time to Waste, as well as a product of research carried out for the photobook ‘Portraits of Injustice: Forced marriage and related sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge’ due to be published in...
[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...
[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...
[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...
[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...
[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...