Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
03 Jun Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law in South Sudan: Possible Actions by Kenya and Uganda
[The author is a Lecturer in International Humanitarian Law at Egerton University.] Introduction Contemporary armed conflicts in Africa and elsewhere continue to pose significant challenges for the legal protection of life, limb, livelihood and property of the individuals and communities caught up in those situations. Most of the unlawful conduct that typifies recent armed conflicts in Africa – including intentionally directing attacks at civilians and civilian objects, use of rape as a weapon of war, recruitment and use of child soldiers, forced marriages and wanton destruction of cultural property –...
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...
25 Apr Pursuing a Comprehensive Non-proliferation and Disarmament Agenda: Irreversible Nuclear Disarmament (IND) – An African Perspective
...states due to political will, thus a more realistic approach to IND as it considers nuclear weapons states’ concerns of geopolitical climate vis-à-vis the nuclear disarmament process. It is also important to highlight that there is a strict interpretation of ‘irreversibility’ that is more aggressive in its approach as it requires nuclear weapons states to completely abandon the production of nuclear weaponry and nuclear weapons facilities. This interpretation is in line with Article VI of the NPT. According to Avid Cliff, Hassan Elbahtimy and Andreas Persbo, this process would require...
21 Feb Workplace Misconduct at the ICC – A Call to Action for Compassionate Leadership (Part II)
what the ICC leadership aspires for – that it has for instance a policy of “zero tolerance for bullying and harassment”. If a lawyer at the Court asks about reporting sexual harassment by a colleague, but her senior colleague warns her against it because the offender is so well-liked, this is precisely a culture of acceptance or licence. In any event, there are also strong arguments that the ‘zero-tolerance’ or old-school approach can be overly legalistic with little room for compassion, versus a more progressive new-school approach which involves “more...24 Oct Book Symposium The Electronic Silk Road: Opportunity and Complexity Along the Electronic Silk Road
...product or service or set of policies to the world? Do you tailor your offerings and approach to different countries or regions based on local law or custom or international norms? Does that calculus change depending on whether you are doing business in Germany versus China? One important approach offered in the book is to use the global trading system to apply the kind of principles like transparency and non-discrimination that have underpinned trade in goods for the last half-century in an attempt to impose disciplines on efforts to discourage...
10 Jul The EU Whistleblowing Directive and #MeToo: A Missed Opportunity for the Advancement of Gender Equality in the EU (Part II)
against harassment at work”. The Commission cited specific pre-existing equality and workers’ rights legislation, including Recast Directive 2006/54/EC, as already containing such protections (see footnotes 20 and 21 of the Explanatory Memorandum). Reflective of this approach, Recital 21 of the Directive states that its provisions “should be without prejudice to the protection granted workers when reporting breaches of Union employment law” and in particular to Article 11 of Council Directive 89/391/EEC, which “already requires Member States to ensure that workers or workers’ representatives are not placed at a disadvantage because...
16 Jul Your Guide to Ecocide: Part 1
in complex environmental cases. Aligning with Environmental Law? However, by far the most difficult issue is how to align the crime of ecocide with environmental law. The difficulties are not immediately obvious, so this will be my main contribution in these two posts. The challenge is comparable to “squaring the circle”: marrying the requirements of criminal law (precision, foreseeability) with environmental law (which involves balancing of different interests and principles). This challenge is the source of most of the controversy around ecocide, as I will explain in the next post....24 Feb Self-Execution Beyond Treaties
enforce federal statutes against state officers via 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in cases in which the underlying statute wasn’t itself clearly meant to be privately enforced; and the Court’s comparable scaling back of implied constitutional remedies against federal officers under Bivens is no less well-entrenched. I open with this point because, the more I read International Law at Home: Enforcing Treaties in U.S. Courts, the more convinced I become that we might draw fairly comprehensive (and perhaps alarming) parallels between the Supreme Court’s evolving approach to domestic enforcement of treaty...
02 Nov Between Elitist Conversations and Local Clusters: How Should we Address English-centrism in International Law?
that, after all, the warnings of political scientist Karl Deutsch may have been right: “Power means not having to listen!”. The importance of the relationship between language and international law cannot be overstated, not least because of the discipline’s universalistic pretence. The choice of language significantly determines the way in which international law is made, interpreted, and applied, what knowledge is produced by scholars, and the participants of the conversation. As Anthea Roberts accounts for in her ground-breaking book Is International Law International?, international law has not remained alien from...11 Jun Guest Post: Suffering Victims and Collective Crimes: The Limits of International Criminal Law
Chamber chose to approach this from an international law perspective, linking this with the principle of non-intervention, which, it recalls, is a customary law rule established by the ICJ in the Nicaragua case. The Judges consider that “while these provisions of customary law govern conduct between States, the Trial Chamber considers that the violation of this principle by a Head of State individually engaging in criminal conduct can be taken into account as an aggravating factor” (§27). This is the first time I see this in a judgment of an...