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Search: crossing lines

19 Jul

...courts and the rest of the world for decades, namely that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is temporary and that measures designating Palestinian land and natural resources for Israeli use are motivated by security concerns. Here are some conclusions by the committee that I wholeheartedly endorse: 1. The so-called “unauthorized” outposts, built without the proper building permits and zoning plans, were as a matter of fact approved and funded by the State of Israel, which provided military protection, installed water and electricity lines, built access roads and funded public...
19.07.12 | |

03 Nov

...from strategic state interests and geopolitical alignments. For example, as Jacobs observes, key Western actors supporting Ukraine’s case against Russia, like Germany and the US have been notably less vocal about Gaza at the ICJ. In contrast, while South Africa and Nicaragua have played visible roles in the Gaza litigation, their engagement with Ukraine’s case has been muted, neither appears to have intervened formally. Such inconsistencies reinforce the perception that legal accountability is applied selectively along political lines. The ICJ is not the UN General Assembly: its authority rests on...
03.11.25 | |

23 Oct

[Chuka Arinze-Onyia is a practicing criminal defense lawyer with an avid interest in international justice issues. He authored this article during a recent stint as an International Justice in Africa Fellow with Amnesty International.] On 16 December 2022, the ICC Prosecutor announced that his office had concluded the investigation phase of its work in Central African Republic (CAR) and would not pursue new lines of inquiry within the country. The immediate consequence of this decision is that until the ordinary national courts develop the capacity to dispense justice for crimes...
23.10.23 | |

30 Nov

...civilized. That was my duty as their leader . . . War gives the appearance of condoning almost everything, but men must live with their actions for a long time afterward. A leader has to help them understand that there are lines they must not cross. He is their link to normalcy, to order, to humanity. If the leader loses his own sense of propriety or shrinks from his duty, anything will be allowed . . . War is, at its very core, the absence of order; and the absence...
30.11.16 | |

20 Oct

...is strong and clear, as this judgement follows a bad experience in the case about the maritime delimitation with Peru (solved by the ICJ in 2014). Moreover, to face the further proceedings on the merits, Chile´s legal team has to change its strategy based in the 1904 Treaty, which was specifically excluded from the discussion by the Court. In this regard is worth asking what were the arguments of the parties? And does Bolivia really have a good case? In the following lines I will try to address these two...
20.10.15 | |

11 Jul

...it is possible that surface scattered human remains (i.e. at the side of a road) may also constitute a mass grave, and reports point to the existence of such circumstances. How Are Mass Graves Protected? Protection of the site is paramount to preserve the integrity of remains, associated evidence and lines of enquiries. Protection measures ought to safeguard the human remains against contamination, desecration, robbery, scavengers and the movement/relocation of bodies to secondary sites, where a perpetrator is seeking to evade detection.  Image from Protocol Appendix 3. Assuming that access...
11.07.22 | |

20 Jan

...within the current understanding of armed attack justifying self-defense, but as that threat begins to emerge more clearly, one can certainly anticipate that arguments will be made that it is close enough. To the extent that there is strong resistance to such efforts to relax the “armed attack” standard, scenarios such as explored here will tend to blur the lines between self-defense and such justifications as necessity and countermeasures. It is widely accepted that necessity cannot be invoked as a justification or defense for violating the prohibition on the use...
20.01.21 | |

18 Jul

...roles over lower-ranking soldiers, illustrating the blurred lines of authority and the operational integration of PMSC staff into state-military frameworks (see here and here). In the words of the Bemba decision of the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber, superior responsibility ex article 28(a) may arise when the forces are structured like a conventional army (see para. 456). This convergence of functions and command dynamics has led scholars such as Kuwali (p. 109) and Frulli (pp. 454-466) to argue that PMSCs should be treated, for purposes of accountability, analogously to formal military units....
18.07.25 | |

02 Apr

...states the operation of different non-national sources of law operating side by side: fundamental principles, customs, treaties, general principles, and party autonomy. It is clear that in the legal order between states, we acknowledge immanent or informal law formation along these lines even if treaties may often be preferred and the other sources have suffered here also because of 19th Century exalted sovereignty ideas. But treaties are there foremost to clarify, be more specific or remedy as indeed bilateral investment treaties (BITs) for the protection of foreign investment normally do....
02.04.12 | |

13 Jun

...self-defense. The prospect that one State may assume a cyberattack falls below a use of force or armed attack threshold while the victim State perceives it as above those lines is not a happy one — it could lead to an unintended escalation of an incident into a larger armed conflict. Add to this the possibility that a victim State may respond by attacking an innocent third State (or non-State actor) because it holds the mistaken belief (on its own or via a successful false flag operation) that the innocent...
13.06.12 | |

06 Feb

...between these two pieces of the story is reasonably clear. The “Goldilocks” part of the story explains why England had a good head start on the race to world power. The clever strategy, the five point plan, shows how the British and then the Americans managed to turn this initial head start into a long term lead. But there is another question. It is one thing to say that having an open society – here, a society eager and able to develop along liberal capitalist lines – is the first...
06.02.08 | |

12 Jul

...legal scene. Continuity is the message. To the extent that there has been recent change, it is not in the way of a revolution but rather of a “reformation” – “a return to an earlier doctrine so as to clear away errors, such as the excessive state-centricity of positivist orthodoxy.” The piece makes the best case that can be made along those lines. It is rich in its documentation of the early and mid-twentieth century literature on NGOs (including in the first volume of the AJIL itself), for which purposes...
12.07.06 | |