Search: palestine icc

This week on Opinio Juris, we continued a few conversations from last week. Kevin Jon Heller clarified his argument about the retroactive acceptance of the ICC’s jurisdiction, and challenged the assumption that Palestine was not a state before last week’s UNGA vote. Deborah Pearlstein advanced three reasons for the importance of Jeh Johnson’s recent speech on the conditions for calling an end to the war on terror. Continuing on the war on terror, Kevin expressed concern over the extension of US targeting policy in Afghanistan to “children with potential hostile...

...by the ICRC in February 1945, Dresden was being burned to ashes by Allied incendiary bombs. Equally, the drafting parties were shaping the conventions against the backdrop of the ongoing violence in Palestine, Indochina, Indonesia and Greece around 1947. Van Dijk’s challenging of this master narrative is timely, particularly when read against the backdrop of current armed conflicts in so many countries, including Ukraine, Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia. The book encourages a train of critical thought that is helpful, when reflecting on where we are, and how we got here....

...served as a signature in the crime. Undaunted, Libya may still try to insinuate that it was some other group–say Iran, operating alone or through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. That, of course, is not an especially exculpatory choice, since after their expulsion from Lebanon, parts of the Palestinian leadership took up residence in Libya. Second, and equally dismaying, Libya may read this triumph as a certified all-purpose “get out of jail free” card–absolving it of a broad swath of bad acts. With oil reserves at play...

...groups have no business resorting to violence in the first place. So I’m afraid they can never get it fully right even if they wanted to. Funny how that works, isn’t it? But the state, ah well that’s a different thing. The state is a thing of beauty you know, it has courts, it can ratify treaties, it can be internationally responsible… CMP: … Precisely. I seem to remember there was some concern about Palestine being denied statehood at every turn… LOAC expert (looking genuinely puzzled): You’d have to go...

[Fred Abrahams covered the Kosovo conflict for Human Rights Watch . He wrote the book Modern Albania and co-wrote A Village Destroyed: War Crimes in Kosovo . Marija Ristic covered Serbian war crimes trials as a journalist for local and international media.] This April, a modest courtroom in Belgrade, Serbia, offered a lens into the global debate on justice for atrocity crimes. The case dealt with mass killings in Kosovo committed 25 years ago but the topic has relevance for Sudan, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and other conflicts today. In the dimly...

...– the manner in which issues or problems are presented shapes our decision-making process; it impacts how legal norms are negotiated, interpreted, and applied (chapter 2). This is something we are no doubt intuitively aware of – the way we present a problem will have an impact the outcome –, but which we perhaps do not think about consciously. Being aware of how these frames work can, amongst others, provide insight on legal strategies. For instance, if Palestine wants to convincingly argue before the ICJ that the monetary gold principle...

...in the Balkans? How about the intervention in Libya? Did the international legal community jump the gun in threatening Ghadaffi and his family with criminal indictments, taking off the table options such as amnesties or exile that might have led to an earlier and less bloody regime change in Libya? Have the competing allegations of war crimes and humanitarian violations made in harder rather than easier to have meaningful peace talks between Israel and Palestine, distracting from the underlying political claims at issue? I look forward to hearing your views....

...policy the wrong way, not knowing that Congress is out to lunch and that US policy has not changed. That’s where the risk comes in. It’s what makes this case less than ideal for adapting the Constitution to the new global dynamic. The Middle East is a throwback to the old world. Arguments like Noah Feldman’s here still make a lot of sense when it comes to Israel-Palestine, even if they don’t make so much sense anywhere else. But the risk may be small enough that the Court is willing...

...pictures of restricted Israeli areas. Iran also claims that it has developed much more advanced drone technology than the Iranian drone launched by Hezbollah and shot down by Israeli forces earlier this month. EU governments are set to debate spending cuts of 50 billion euro later this week. A recent poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Catalans would like a referendum on independence from Spain. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is going ahead with his plan of seeking upgraded observer status for Palestine in the UN General Assembly next month....

...could better hold us legally liable if we went public with information about wrongdoing we perceived to be in the public interest. Finally, the consequences speak for themselves: Dr. Azarova has still lost her job; I as a person of colour have lost my job in order to truthfully bring details of this incident to light; Palestinian rights and international law with respect to the Israel/Palestine situation are now demonstrably a taboo subject in the law school; and the powerful white men who are at the heart of this impropriety...

...with the twenty years anniversary of its adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – and in light of its witnessing of forms of impunity in Vietnam and Palestine, the General Assembly accepted its so-called “Teheran Resolution,” demanding the recognition of human rights in wartime. Soon after, the UN Secretary-General published one of his famous reports, entitled “Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts,” which helped to further stimulate the overall drafting process. In other words, the UN, under the strong influence of its Human Rights Division led by...

...scholar, he railed against the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine, against zionist ethno-chauvinism, and against domination more widely; likewise, as a professor of literature, he rallied against cognitive and ideological obfuscations. Said was particularly disdainful of mercenary intellectuals—those who followed the herd and commodified their intellectual work in exchange for status, influence, or invitations to boards, consultancies, and other baubles. By contrast, he valued intellectuals who acted as “insurgents”, characters who not only critique existing systems of power but who are courageous enough to use their knowledge to destabilise them...