Search: palestine icc

...the holy month of Ramadan. IPS reports about the plans of Palestine to ask for non-member observer status at the United Nations September 27th. The Hill reports that Syrian rebel forces are entertaining the idea of joining forces with al-Qaeda. UNICEF is concerned with the increasing number of children being recruited as soldiers in Northern Mali. The New York Times reports that Iraq has been aiding Iran for months in getting around sanctions posed by the United States. Anti-Japanese protests took place in more than 20 Chinese cities on Sunday...

...lives.” And yet justice was experienced differently in the two tribunals as analyzed above. The establishment of the ICC did not remove focus from the prioritization of white lives as the court’s largest and most efficient investigation has been in Ukraine, where the court also conducted an unprecedented campaign to raise funds to support the investigation.  However, the ICC paved the way for a period when international justice became very committed to prosecuting Africans. Despite having a docket made up exclusively of Africans, when accused of having an African bias,...

British artist Banksy knocks it out of the park again, with a rather unusual rendering of a Nativity scene: As ArtInfo notes, this is not Banksy’s first comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict. He painted nine amazing murals directly on the wall in 2005, including a boy drawing a chalk ladder over the wall and a girl floating over the wall with a bouquet of balloons. Is there a more brilliant and politically insightful artist working today than Banksy? I’m still blown away by the meat truck filled with wailing stuffed...

Brazil is back. After four years of retrenchment, the new Lula government seems ready to assume, once again, a key position in the international stage. This is a role that Lula knows how to play well. His previous government created the now defunct Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), meant as a counter-weight to a US-dominated OAS. By the time he left office, the region had even recognised the State of Palestine, a clear sign of how much he had successfully de-US-ified South America. Now that he is back in...

...international criminal law as a way to hold individuals accountable for environmental damage, including for destruction that is not related to armed conflict. In September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa (island nations particularly vulnerable to environmental destruction) proposed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) be amended to include ‘ecocide’ – defined as “unlawful wanton acts committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts” (our emphasis) – as an international...

...in International Law at the Institute of Law, Birzeit University Institute of Law and Assistant Editor of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law. Claire Smith is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. ** A note on language: we intentionally tie racist action to people, noting Bonilla-Silva’s observation of the intellectual tendency to have racism without racists. This act presents racism as a disembodied phenomena rather than attributable to people, undermining the humanity of those who suffer it. *** We explore these themes as part of our project, provisionally...

Diane Sawyer had a hard-hitting report tonight at ABC News on the recent hostilities between Israel and Palestine. The segment opens with her saying, “We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel today as Israel tried to shoot them out of the sky.” As she speaks, a video box next to her shows explosions on an urban landscape. Sawyer then shows a still photo of two haggard men carrying clothes in front of a destroyed building and says, “here is an Israeli family trying to salvage...

The UNGA is expected to recognize Palestine as a “non-member” state during a vote today. Following massive protests earlier this week in Cairo, the Assembly drafting the new Egyptian Constitution has vowed to publish, and vote on, a draft today. The US is considering options to intervene more strongly in the Syrian conflict, while the EU has renewed its sanctions for another three months leaving the door open for a closer involvement after March 1. China will give police in its Southern Hainan province broader powers to board and search...

has already been opened at the ICC, if the acts in question are connected, it is likely that opening a case regarding them would be more easily justified in terms of gravity. Nevertheless, the serious degradation of the victims, the severe mental suffering inflicted on those who may know they are being filmed and their families who see the footage, and the fact that similar acts have been prosecuted as war crimes on their own in domestic jurisdictions demonstrate that the gravity threshold should be met. Should the ICC decide...

...of Events Theory, or Nadelstichtaktik (needle prick). During the 1970s, Israel invoked Nadelstichtaktik to justify its bombardment of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) strongholds in Lebanon as being in response to a series of small-scale attacks by the PLO. Under Israel’s theory, though each individual act of terrorism by the PLO may not have risen to the level of armed attack triggering an Article 51 right to self-defense, the sum of the combined consequences of the campaign of terrorist attacks crossed that threshold. The primary thrust of this theory is that...

...Robert A. Williams Jr.’s quip is biting: “They are law professors, after all, so they don’t listen to other people’s stories.” But the diagnosis of the three scholars in this section is more insidious, still. In this age of virtual lecturing, asynchronous recordings, casualisation, surveillance, and punishment, critical legal scholars are at risk. We are, to borrow a fitting adage, handing them the rope with which to hang us. Brendan Ciarán Browne exploits his ‘above-the-bar’ privilege to elicit awareness of the dangers of teaching about Palestine in the virtual lecture...

...structure of the Lab. Our Lab has increased in size from 5 to 17 students from the Law School. The students come from a wide range of backgrounds representing the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Canada, Egypt, Palestine and India. For the first time, we have a number of Arabic speakers, which is incredibly important given that so much of the primary material originates in Arabic. Their linguistic and cultural fluency not only improves the accuracy of our verification work but also ensures that we approach each investigation with greater...