In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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02 Dec

...the crime of persecution which can be committed “against any identifiable group,” on enumerated grounds. Referring simply to “groups,” rather than “racial groups” or “gender groups,” avoids resurrecting mid-century notions of race and gender as biological categories. Courts would not need to search for hereditary or physical features to determine who qualifies as a victim. Adding the words “based on” (or alternatively, “on the grounds of”) reinforces a perpetrator-based view of group identity, aligning with how persecution crimes are interpreted by international criminal tribunals and how discrimination is understood under...
02.12.25 | and |

08 Jun

[Carsten Stahn is Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice and Programme Director of the Grotius Centre for International Studies.This two-part post is based on a talk given at the seminar on Reconciliation v. Accountability: Balancing Interests of Peace and Justice, organized by the Centre for International Law Research and Policy on 29 May 2015 at the Peace Palace.] Introduction Punishment and reconciliation are closely linked. In this post, I would like to explore one issue of this relationship, namely the link between the retributive and restorative justice. The...
08.06.15 | |

01 Mar

in this cycle of crisis and reform? Looking back at how the instrument of sanctions has evolved, the relationship between sanctions researchers and policymakers has sometimes been symbiotic. The invention of ‘targeted’ sanctions – also tendentiously labelled ‘smart’ – is a case in point. This concept was constructed by academics and policymakers jointly, during conferences sponsored by the Swedish, German and Swiss governments (see Biersteker et al 2015). That researchers aim at policy impact, and policymakers search to empirically validate their positions, is certainly not unique to the field of...
01.03.22 | |

08 Apr

...Enjoy! Luis Moreno Ocampo, The Challenges for the Next ICC Prosecutor David Crane, The Chief Prosecutor: Diplomat, Politician, Leader, Manager, and Lawyer Liz Evenson, The Next ICC Prosecutor Should Resolutely Hold the Most Powerful to Account Christian De Vos and Mariana Pena, Electing the Next ICC Prosecutor: A Generational Opportunity, Stephen Lamony, The Next ICC Prosecutor Geoff Dancy, Evaluating the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Tom Dannenbaum, Against Modesty at the ICC Douglas Guilfoyle, How do we assess the performance of the ICC’s first Prosecutors? William Schabas, ICC Prosecutor Symposium: The Search...
08.04.20 | |

15 Nov

...Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will host a conference “Pluralist Approaches to International Criminal Justice”. The event is held with the financial support of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and concludes the research project“ Dealing with Divergence? National Adjudication of I nternational Crimes ” funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The conference provides a platform for an interdisciplinary and critical debate on the methodological, institutional, and cultural diversity in international criminal justice (see further information). Speakers include Elies van Sliedregt, Kai Ambos, Robert Cryer, Megan...
15.11.15 | |

28 Oct

knowledge of course material through the analysis of fictional fact patterns. Law school is more of the same, frequently featuring surprisingly fantastical hypos. That is how we learn. And in fact, scratching one’s head while trying to reconcile IHL with fictional universes is in itself an opportunity to mitigate one of IHL’s major flaws: reactivity. States dedicate a significant amount of money towards their militaries, including research and development. And while Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions stipulates that states should consider whether their research of or development of...
28.10.21 | |

14 Jan

...armed conflict in the legal sense. Conversely, a State can deny the existence of armed conflict and still be bound by IHL if the objective criteria are met. Armed conflict classification is an objective determination, made based on facts and legal criteria established under IHL. The classic formulation is the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Appeals Chamber’s statement in Prosecutor v Tadić: an armed conflict exists whenever there is protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organised armed groups, or between such groups within a State (para....
14.01.26 | |

04 Apr

...example, ground operations, establishment of military installations, defensive preparations, quartering of troops, and search operations. It has been said that this requirement to take ‘constant care’ must “animate all strategic, operational and tactical decision-making.” In assessing the risk to civilians that may arise from the use of an AI-DSS, a first step must be assessing whether the system is actually suitable for the intended task. Applying AI – particularly machine learning – to problems for which it is not well suited, has the potential to actually undermine decision-making (p 19)....
04.04.24 | |

02 Aug

...three special envoys. In July 1797, Congress authorized the President to use naval vessels “to defend the sea coast, and to repel and hostility to their [United States’] vessels and commerce, within their [United States’] jurisdiction.” Seizures continued. Some members of Congress thought they were sufficiently numerous and illegal that France had started a war; others disagreed. All thought that Congress had the authority to determine the U.S. response. In February 1798 Adams reported to Congress that French privateers had entered Charleston harbor and attacked shipping there, burning one British...
02.08.07 | |

22 Mar

...United Nations to promote the establishment of a war crimes tribunal where these crimes could be addressed’. Information on the resolution can be found here, and the full text as passed can be found here. The resolution was sponsored by Rep Chris Smith, a Republican of New Jersey, and was co-sponsored by one Democrat and three other Republicans. This is something of a personal victory for Smith, who has been advocating for a war crimes tribunal for Syria since at least September 2013 (this Google search links to all articles...
22.03.16 | |

01 Mar

...governments,” the Act seems to continuously link the immunity of international organizations to that of foreign governments, so as to ensure ongoing parity between the two. The statute could otherwise have simply stated that international organizations “shall enjoy absolute immunity from suit,” or specified some other fixed level of immunity. Other provisions of the IOIA, such as the one making the property and assets of international organizations “immune from search,” use such noncomparative language to define immunities in a static way…Or the statute could have specified that it was incorporating...
01.03.19 | |

20 Apr

LRA) on their own initiative, through escape or by abandoning the group. In short, it may amount to strategic short-term media outreach to portray child soldiers as passive clueless victims, devastated, devoid of agency, or dehumanized tools of war robotically programmed to kill. But these images belie a much more sublime, humanistic, and granular reality of resilience and potential. Unfortunately, the Kony2012 campaign, and clicktivism generally, has a short attention span and limited shelf-life. Roger Alford opened this roundtable by posting a graph of the search volume index of “Kony”....
20.04.12 | |