Search: palestine icc

...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....

...pressure from the ICRC and France (and given the absence of supporters of the arch-occupier paradigm in the Conference), rather than blocking the debate, the UK “started thinking about how to use it for its own purposes while attenuating its effects on Britain’s interests in the context of growing East-West tensions and the violent insurgency in Palestine” (p. 75). In order to achieve progress, the ICRC, in turn, sought to balance these concerns with the human rights demands of Nazi victims. The result was a draft that incorporated “only a...

...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...

...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...

...international law in places such as Hungary (1956), Egypt (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1978-1989), Iran (1980-1988), Iraq (2003), Palestine (since 1948), etc. That is why I believe that in dealing with the Syrian civil war, the Security Council operated exactly as it was intended to function. It prioritized the strategic interests of a Great Power – Russia – over the human costs of war. This is because the Security Council is not a global law enforcer. It is not an international 911 dispatcher. Nor is it a collective security mechanism...

...“homo homini lupus”) which masks as order its core logic of conquest and domination. Trump’s dystopian visions (from Greenland to Panama, from Eastern Ukraine to Palestine), constrained less by common values and normative commitments than by realpolitik considerations, do not so much disrupt the international order as they lay bare the underlying architecture that has long sustained it. As such, Morocco’s intensifying integration of Western Sahara into its economy, premised on landgrab and segregation and facilitated by European complicity and rhetorical appeals to “development”, reflects international law’s systemic inability to...

Sponsored Announcements Admissions to the third edition of the Master in Democratic Governance – Democracy and Human Rights in the MENA Region (DE.MA) are open: first round deadline – 30 May 2016; second round deadline – 30 June 2016. DE.MA was created thanks to the support of the European Union and of the Danish Institute for Human Rights. It is based on a partnership between EIUC and the following universities: International University of Rabat (Rabat, Morocco), Birzeit University (Birzeit, Palestine), St Joseph University (Beirut, Lebanon), Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy)...

A U.S. drone strike killed eight people in northwestern Pakistan, the latest in a series of drone attacks that come as a retired U.S. general Stanley McChrystal warns their overuse may threaten American foreign policy goals. The trial of former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic resumed in The Hague on Monday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has asked that government-issued documents, such as passports, include the words “State of Palestine” instead of “Palestinian Authority,” though there will be no rush to replace ID cards or passports to avoid confrontation with Israel....

...Court. The Prosecutor of the ICC is solely responsible for the selection of situations (subject perhaps to some measure of intervention by the Pre-Trial Chamber, a matter still being adjudicated). She or he takes the decision whether to investigate and prosecute in Palestine or Afghanistan, in Ukraine or Côte d’Ivoire, in Colombia or Venezuela, in Uganda or Myanmar. She or he alone determines whether those being prosecuted are military commanders, political leaders, religious personalities, industrialists, leaders or lackeys. Even the earlier prosecutors, like Jackson, Goldstone and Arbour, never had to...

...perpetrators’ perception (meaning who the perpetrator intended to target), or (2) based on the victims’ membership in the targeted group “in fact.” The first option requires “subjective criteria” and underscores that categories such as gender and race are social constructs. What is relevant under this option is that perpetrators targeted the victim because they believed the victim was a member of the targeted group.  International and domestic jurisprudence and the ICC Policy Paper on the Crime of Gender Persecution affirm this understanding of “groups” under persecution. Taking language from the...

While in DC last week for the ICC/Palestine event at George Mason — I’ll post a link to the video when it becomes available — I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lawfare’s Wells Bennet and Just Security’s Steve Vladeck to discuss the oral argument at the DC Circuit on the al-Bahlul remand, which the three of us attended that morning. You can listen to the podcast at Lawfare here; Steve did most of the talking, because he understands the constitutional issues in the case better than anyone, but...

[Valentina Azarov is a Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights, Al-Quds Bard College, Al-Quds University, Palestine (on leave)] This is the fifth response in our Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation. Earlier posts can be found in the Related Links at the end of this post. Those who believe in the progressive development of international law but remain fully aware of the deficiencies of its enforcement, have good reason to view the proposed functional approach to the law of occupation with cautious optimism. However, there...