Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
10 Jul The Conundrum of International Organisations Immunities: Jam et al v International Finance Corporation (Part 1 of 2)
[Rishi Gulati is a Barrister at the Victorian Bar, Australia; Dickson Poon Scholar of Law at King’s College London; and Academic Expert, Bretton Woods Law, London] Following the conclusion of the much discussed Haiti Cholera Class Action in US courts, the immunities of international organisations (IOs) have again been tested in the courts of that country in claims filed against the International Finance Corporation (‘IFC’), a financial institution within the World Bank Group. This is the first of a two part post. In Part I, I canvass some general matters...
26 Mar Symposium on Prosecuting Heads of State for International Crimes: The Tangled Legal Terrain of the Maduro Cases – Crimes Against Humanity, Drug Trafficking and the Immunity of an Alleged President
...office of Head of State as a matter of fact rather than of law (de facto as opposed to de jure), regardless of whether power was acquired through unlawful means, which should be left to each country’s internal affairs. In the present case, Maduro would be granted personal immunity even in the U.S. proceedings, since he claims to be still holding office. This approach, grounded in the doctrine of effective power, was originally conceived to protect States from external interference and to safeguard the people’s right to self-determination. In practice,...
25 Feb More Than Rhetoric? International Criminal Justice, Crime Semantics and the Role of the ICC in the Ukraine Conflict
[Carsten Stahn is Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice at Leiden Law School.] ‘In times of war, the law falls silent’ (silent enim leges inter arma). This famous maxim by Cicero is often used to illustrate the lack of power of law in the face of conquest and occupation. In the discourse over the war in Ukraine, we witness the opposite. As Marko Milanović has shown in his analysis of recognition, it is a ‘communicative war’, a battle where legal semantics are at the forefront of justifications and...
06 Oct The Russian Citizenship Law in Ukraine and International Law
Ministry of Internal Affairs. No requirement such as the 5-year period of permanent residence in Russia nor the evidence of sufficient funds to live in the country is envisaged. This post argues that this act amounts to a violation of international law, in particular to an interference in Ukrainian domestic affairs and a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty. Domestic Law Ukrainian officials, in particular the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mr Dmytro Kuleba, declared that this act is a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and an interference in the State’s own domestic affairs....
26 Jun Between Recognition and Denial: Reading Recent Recognition Initiatives in Light of Earlier Milestones in Madrid, Oslo and the General Assembly
statehood, international lawyers often retreat to the trap of declaratory versus constitutive statehood. Such frameworks have not helped Palestinians before and they won’t now. At best, interrogating these typologies reveals how contingent and political the process of state-making is. As Joseph Weiler noted in 2013 in the wake of Palestine’s recognition as a non-member observer state at the UN in 2012, embracing either a constitutive or a declarative stance is unhelpful in the face of Palestine’s own ‘differentiated’, but nevertheless, ‘evolving’ statehood. Similarly, today, we find ourselves as international lawyers...09 Mar Ukraine Insta-Symposium: The Crisis in Crimea–The Protection of Nationals Abroad and the Legality of Ukraine’s Possible Use of Force in Self-Defense
to act in individual or collective self-defense. The answer is no – despite the conclusion made by the Ukrainian Association of International Law that Russia’ military action in Crimea “provides legal grounds” for Ukraine exercising its right of individual or collective self-defense. True, states’ reactions to the occupations of South Korea in 1950, the Falkland Islands in 1982 and Kuwait in 1990 leave no doubt that the commencement of occupation clearly amounts to the commencement of an armed attack. Furthermore, the 1974 Definition of Aggression and the Amendments to the...
07 Nov State Outsourcing of Information Operations: From Attribution to Aspiration – Part II
...enough to deviate from the mantra that the law and practice is what it is, the rest is ‘just politics’, and the bad and sad probably cannot be made better by applying the very laws and practices that some might insist are good, even when seemingly incapable of producing anything close to it. The law governing international responsibility needs a vision setting out where practice should go, and that vision must extend beyond the ‘political realities’ corrupting and distorting international law and relations. While the current state of international law...
22 Oct Israel’s Ecological Apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
...continues Suha’s work to give voice to the resilient Palestinian people, particularly women, who are courageously enduring the harmful environmental effects of Israel’s prolonged occupation and apartheid. Since its occupation in 1967, Israel’s ecological destruction and restructuring of the oPt’s topography has been orchestrated militarily, with the objective of establishing and maintaining more settlements in the oPt. This article provides a non-comprehensive overview of the ecological destruction of various kinds, especially that affecting agricultural land and deriving from, inter alia, the construction and expansion of settlements. Further, this article argues...04 Jan The End of Russia´s Hybrid War against Ukraine?
[Sergey Sayapin LLB, LLM, Dr. iur. is an Assistant Professor in International and Criminal Law at KIMEP University’s School of Law, Almaty, Kazakhstan, since 2014, and Director of the LLB in International Law Programme.] Introduction On 25 November 2018, Russia attacked and seized three Ukrainian navy vessels, which were on their way from Odessa to Mariupol. Russia´s Federal Security Service said Ukrainian warships had entered Russia´s territorial waters without prior notification. Ukraine insisted that this contention was not correct, and that in accordance with Article 2(1) of the 2003 Treaty...
11 Aug What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Restitution, Reparations, and Renewal (Part 3)
is permitted to envision Gaza’s future? Proponents of the first two counterfactuals deny this possibility to Palestinians, leaving the only plausible outcomes genocide today or genocide tomorrow. Each of these two visions is crafted in distant capitals, grounded in an anachronistic settler-colonial blueprint of elimination (the zionist fever dream) or managed suffering (legal Gaza). For all its pretensions, even international law leaves the Palestinians at mortal risk. For the colonised, law is always Janus-faced, furnishing grammar without justice, procedure without protection. In Palestine, law is caught performing debates while doing...