Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation

[Kristina Daugirdas is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.] Absent a contractual relationship, individuals who have been harmed by the acts of international organizations rarely have access to institutions to hear their claims. National courts are often unavailable on account of organizations’ immunities. Some organizations have established alternative mechanisms to resolve such claims. The World Bank Inspection Panel is one example; the Ombudsperson for the ISIL and Al-Qaida UN Security Council Sanctions regime is another. Such accountability mechanisms must be deliberately designed, adopted, and implemented....

[Robert Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at the New York University School of Law.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law Symposium, Volume 52, Issues 1 and 2. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The Article by Shaffer and Trachtman is a tour de force: it identifies and explains many of the most important interpretative choices that panels and the Appellate Body have made in adjudicating disputes under WTO law, and speculates on the...

[James A. Green is Professor of Public International Law at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK ,co-rapporteur of the International Law Association’s Use of Force Committee and a former editor-in-chief of the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law . His most recent book is Collective Self-Defence in International Law (CUP, 2024).] Pål Wrange once wrote that the meaning of prohibited ‘force’ was “the subject of controversy par excellence in international law.” The question of what exactly Article 2(4) UNC (and its customary international law...

[ David Sloss, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Global Law and Policy, Santa Clara University School of Law, describes his recently published article, Executing Foster v. Neilson: The Two-Step Approach to Analyzing Self-Executing Treaties. This article is part of the Third Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Medellin v. Texas unleashed a flood of new scholarship on the doctrine of self-executing treaties. Unfortunately, the entire debate has been founded on two erroneous assumptions. First, courts and commentators have assumed that...

[Nandor Knust is an associate professor of law at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT)] Gaiane Nuridzhanian’s The Principle of Ne Bis in Idem in International Criminal Law offers a comprehensive examination of the ne bis in idem principle in the realm of international criminal law. Drawing from her extensive academic and professional background, Nuridzhanian provides an in-depth analysis of how this principle functions within international legal frameworks. Introduction The principle of ne bis in idem, rooted in Roman law, holds that no individual should be tried or punished twice for...

[Opeyemi Lawal is an investigative journalist with the Foundation of Investigative Journalism (FIJ), Nigeria, and creator of MobWatch. She was a cohort member of the WITNESS’ Fortifying Community Truth project in West and Central Africa cohort for 2024. Georgia Edwards is the senior program coordinator of Evidence and Investigations at WITNESS. She works with journalists and activists on investigations using visual evidence through video documentation, analysis and presentation and is part of the Fortifying Community Truth project, led by the Africa team at WITNESS] Introduction The proliferation of smartphones and...

[Alexander Heinze is an Acting Professor at the University of Bremen and lecturer at the University of Göttingen] Part 1 of this post examined the Trial Chamber V’s remarkably efficient case management approach in Yekatom and Ngaïssona, highlighting how flexibility became the key to handling an exceptionally complex trial with nearly 20,000 exhibits and 174 witnesses. I explored the Chamber’s innovative approach to modes of liability – particularly its elastic application of Article 25(3)(c) regarding aiding and abetting – and its paradigmatic “submission approach” to evidence that prioritized manageability over...

CESCR at this stage is still preliminary. It is hard to predict to what extent the CESCR can expand that approach to international economic governance. More importantly, the “normative benchmarks” deriving from Buser’s human rights-based approach, arguably represent minimum requirements for great powers. It is hard to say whether such an approach can justify reform of international economic governance to an extent expected by many developing states. Second, I think a major impediment to better international economic governance and further global justice is the very approach of economic liberalization that...

70). This seems to turn a blind eye on the way proceedings are being conducted at the ICC, though. Some Chambers, such as in Ongwen (paras 24 ff) rejected the Chambers’ previous practice of deciding on admissibility issues at the moment of submission (‘admission approach’) and promoted an alternative approach that deferred the admissibility decision ‘until the end of the proceedings’ (‘submission approach’) (Bemba et al., para 9). The submission approach was more recently adopted by Trial Chamber X in the Al Hassan case (paras 29 ff), and given that...

...and ‘contributing’ to the crimes of a group acting with a common purpose (accessory liability) is also blurred. ICC jurisprudence has adopted a peculiar approach for differentiating between those situations and for justifying the assertion that the perpetrators of crimes, defined in Article 25(3)(a), bear greater blameworthiness. Borrowing heavily from German criminal law theory, and especially from the writings of Claus Roxin, the Lubanga and the Katanga and Ngudjolo Pre-Trial Chambers chose the ‘control over the crime’ theory to distinguish between principals and accessories to the crime. On this account,...

[Marina Aksenova is an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Criminal Law at IE University] The advance of artificial intelligence (AI) represents a seismic shift in how we regulate and structure societies. The question of what keeps us human in the age of algorithmic and synthetic reasoning is then far from trivial. Spontaneous creativity may be one of the answers. This symposium discusses my new book Art, Aesthetics and International Justice (Routledge, 2025). Six wonderful contributions appearing over the course of the next few days engage with the major themes...

[Karen J. Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University, and Jacqueline McAllister is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College (as of July 2014).] Many thanks to Solomon Ebobrah, Kofi Kufuor, and Horace Adjolohoun for their challenging and insightful comments our AJIL article, A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa. We are pleased to have provoked a debate about the drivers of legal integration in Africa and to...