Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
18 Mar Lubanga Decision Roundtable: Lubanga, Sexual Violence and the Legal Re-Characterization of Facts
and that it means something that these are used or not? Of course, the whole international criminal law project is built on this moral outrage and its direct impact on the creative development of the law, through the activism of judges. Maybe this was necessary in the beginning, because, let’s face it, there would not be an international criminal law to talk about without it. Indeed, there is no doubt that international judges, more than any other “community” of international criminal justice, have taken a central role in the development...27 Feb Kenyan Appeals Court Strongly Affirms That al-Bashir Cannot Claim Immunity As a Defense Against the ICC’s Arrest Warrants
...the first place. In taking this approach the Kenyan Court of Appeal deftly acknowledges that despite the potential political conflicts that there is no real legal conflict between provisions on the Rome Statute with respect to immunity. This same approach was supported by the International Commission of Jurist’s submission to South African Parliament signed by six former Constitutional Court Justices and Navi Pillay the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In a judgment that has received praise from international law experts John Dugard and Guénaël Mettraux no less,...21 Jul Emerging Voices: Cyber Operations and the Prohibition of the Threat of Force
force in the same circumstances. This is the contemporary leading approach among scholars and is, for instance, the approach followed by rule 12 of the Tallinn Manual: A cyber operation, or threatened cyber operation, constitutes an unlawful threat of force when the threatened action, if carried out, would be an unlawful use of force. Is a general threat to resort to force enough to constitute a violation of the prohibition of Article 2(4)? The answer is unequivocally yes. Most verbal or written threats of force constitute a general threat of...
01 May AI and Machine Learning Symposium: Command in the Age of Autonomy–Unanswered Questions for Military Operations
[Eve Massingham , Simon McKenzie and Rain Liivoja are members of the Law and the Future of War Research Group at the University of Queensland Law School. The Research Group receives funding from the Australian Government through the Defence Cooperative Research Centre for Trusted Autonomous Systems. The views and opinions expressed in the article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government or any other institution. This post is part of our symposium on legal, operational, and ethical questions on the use...05 Jan Who Decides and Why?
They are particularly successful at documenting how the GMO dispute has, at the same time, hardened some soft law instruments while also softening some hard law. This insight alone would make the book worth reading. Where the book falls down a bit is in exploring a central question embedded in this insight—whether it is appropriate for the WTO’s dispute resolution process to dramatically expand the reach of trade law into erstwhile domestic environmental, consumer and food safety law questions via broad application of the SPS Agreement premise that regulation must...
03 Jun ICL and Environmental Protection Symposium: Can Ecocide Save the Planet? An International Crime of Climate Change
[Kate Mackintosh is the inaugural Executive Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law. This is part of a series of blog posts examining International Criminal Law and the Protection of the Environment, and stems from an expert meeting group convened at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law in February 2020.] The appeal of using international criminal law to protect the environment is intuitive: the destruction of our environment poses the greatest contemporary threat to the values that body of...
25 Oct International Law and Popular Culture Symposium: Depictions of Colonialism and Oppression in 4X Video Games
[Alonso Gurmendi is a contributor for Opinio Juris and Assistant Professor at Universidad del Pacífico Law School, in Lima, Peru.] I am a long-time fan of 4X games. For the uninitiated, that stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit & Exterminate Games – a (lame) 1990s pun turned game-genre, coined by Video-Game reviewer Alan Emrich who wanted to promote his Master of Orion review by saying it was “Rated XXXX”. To use Emrich’s original definition, 4X games are those in which “players must rise from humble beginnings, finding their way around the...
15 Mar Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian Border Crisis and Ius ad Bellum Part II
[Mateusz Piątkowski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland (Faculty of Law and Administration, International Law Department), Attorney-at-law, and Member of the Polish Society of the Military Law and the Law of War. You can find Part I of this post here.] Under international law, military confrontations between states are measured by their intensity and gravity. To establish the threshold and to distinguish between the less and more grave forms of use of force, ius ad bellum offers a three-tier classification of interstate incidents. Tier one is...
11 Feb The Gambia v. Myanmar and the Nature of Genocidal “Intent to Destroy” before the ICJ (As Opposed to Criminal Courts)
was targeted for destruction in its entirety or in substantial part.” These observations appear to negate the need for reading the definition of genocide more strictly than is required by the Convention as interpreted according to the law of treaties, in any event before the ICJ. To conclude, the difference between the two legal disciplines is too substantial, rendering it all the more plausible that the interpretation of the Convention—and identically worded penal statutes—may yield different results in a criminal law context than its interpretation according to the law of...08 Nov The Oxford Guide to Treaties Symposium: What Happens if a Treaty Reservation is Invalid?
not bound by the treaty.” (emphasis added) But the presumption is clear: “Unless the author of an invalid reservation has expressed a contrary intention or such an intention is otherwise established, it is considered a contracting State … without the benefit of the reservation.” On its face, this approach makes little sense and smacks of unfairness. As the United States has consistently noted, it is difficult to square this approach with the bedrock principle of treaty law that States are bound only to those obligations they affirmatively consent to undertake....