Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
10 Aug Doing Justice to History Symposium: Judicializing History in Jenin? Reflections on the Possibilities of Imagining Palestine Otherwise at the ICC
occupied lands, would find themselves pushed into smaller enclaves while the Israeli army and civilian settlers moved in. This general structural context of foreign rule whether understood through the (partially inter-related) lenses of settler colonialism, occupation or apartheid provided the conditions for increasingly radical inter-communal conflicts that have become ever more destructive in their intensity. As the occupation has become more entrenched, so too has been the reliance on framing Israel’s rule through the language of international law. Once the majority of Palestinians recognised that armed struggle, negotiations and regional...
14 Nov Doing Business in Illegal Israeli Settlements, the Dutch Way
[Alessandra Spadaro works as Assistant Professor in public international law at Utrecht University. She is conducting a three-year project on “Business in and for war: the role and limits of international humanitarian law”, funded by the Dutch Research Council.] On 6 November 2025, The Hague Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in a case brought by a coalition of Palestinian and Dutch NGOs against the Netherlands for failing to take sufficient steps to prevent genocide and other international law violations by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). The...
05 Apr Of Palestinian Liars and Israeli Saints: Confronting Anti-Palestinian Racism in International Law
underlying epistemology of international law. Above all, proponents of the international legal regime claim that, however flawed, it remains an efficacious framework for the resolution of conflict. Yet, when assessed alongside the atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians, we are forced to conclude that international law appears sanguine about their annihilation, posturing as the solution while failing to restrain the actions of a tiny state that declares itself beyond the regime’s reach. What value does international law hold if it cannot prevent one state’s massacre of nearly 35,000 people, its maiming...
14 May How did the Israeli Supreme Court Legitimise Starvation as a Weapon of War? An Autopsy of a Ruling (Part 1)
armed conflict (LOAC), the laws of belligerent occupation, and international human rights law (IHRL). These bodies of law, the petitioners argued, entail two kinds of obligations: negative obligations to refrain from harming the civilian population by obstructing the delivery of supplies necessary for their survival, alongside positive obligations guaranteeing that the population’s humanitarian needs are met. The Court’s first move was to limit Israel’s legal obligations towards Gaza’s civilian population to negative duties ‘to allow and facilitate’ aid, by claiming that LOAC serves as the primary and exclusive normative framework...
17 Mar Looking for a Solution Under International Law for the Moldova – Transnistria Conflict
a clear comparison. The international community has widely condemned Russia’s occupation of Crimea as violation of international law because the occupation violates Ukraine’s sovereignty. Like Transnistria, Crimea voted overwhelmingly in a referendum over whether to join Russia. Moreover, Crimea has a significant Russian population, as Transnistria does, but again that does not make Crimea part of Russia. There is no basis under international law for Transnistria to join Russia without Moldova’s permission and Moldova would of course never allow that. Is Russia violating international law? Though Russia has served as...
29 Jul Symposium on Unbroken Bond: Tracing the Ties Between African and Palestinian Anti-Colonial Struggles – Race as a Tool of Oppression: Settler Colonialism in Africa and Palestine Through the Lens of Black Radical Thought
[David Arita is a finalist LLB student at Kabarak University and former Peer-Review Editor of the Kabarak Law Review, an Afrocentric law review.] European colonial powers used pseudo-scientific racial underpinnings to justify their conquest and the exploitation of African lands and peoples. This racial ideology served multiple purposes including providing a moral justification for colonisation, facilitating the exploitation of African labour, and underwriting the policies of segregation and unequal development. Similarly, the Zionist settler project in Palestine has gained justification from racial hegemony, manifesting through ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and...12 Nov Pacta Tertiis, Waiver of Rights and Legal Ideology: Comments on Greek Reparations and the 1990 Two-Plus-Four Treaty
[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 or persistence of reparations claims belonging to Greek nationals and stemming from violations of the laws of war during Greece’s WW2 occupation. This short discussion concludes with some...
20 Aug Muddying the Waters Still Further: A Response to Steven Kay and Joshua Kern
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and considering the coercive nature of Jordanian control, the law of occupation is the only appropriate normative framework which can define Jordanian effective control of the West Bank territory between 1949 and 1967.” I have already dealt with Article 2(4). It was clearly not applicable. Regarding the law of occupation, it should be noted that Jordan terminated its occupation of the West Bank on 2 November 1949. Accordingly, there is no basis in law to claim that Jordan was an occupying power in the...23 Sep Book Symposium: Cyber War – A Duty to Hack and the Boundaries of Analogical Reasoning
subject to physical, territorial boundaries, most notable in on-going debates about which governance models best serve cyberspace (the traditional sovereign territorial model, a multistakeholder model where cyberspace is a res communis, or some sort of hybrid approach). But, I notice similar sorts of conceptual boundary disputes in questions over what rules of international law apply in cyberspace, with much of the existing analyses resting on analogies to pre-existing regulatory regimes. I find this “law-by-analogy” approach problematic, particularly when it comes to IHL and rules on the use of force. My...