Search: self-defense
05 Mar If Unilateral Force Becomes Normalized, Who Will be Disciplined Next and by Whom? The Structural Vulnerability of Third World Sovereignty
...integrity or political independence of States. Self defence is an exception under Article 51; and and actions authorized by the Security Council are deliberately narrow (see UNSC Res 678 (1990), UN Doc S/RES/678 ; UNSC Res 1973 (2011), UN Doc S/RES/1973). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has consistently interpreted the “inherent right” of self defence under Article 51 in the decisions of Nicaragua v United States and Iran v United States only arising “if an armed attack occurs” requiring a threshold of gravity, necessity and proportionality. The architecture of...
26 Mar Symposium on Prosecuting Heads of State for International Crimes: The Tangled Legal Terrain of the Maduro Cases – Crimes Against Humanity, Drug Trafficking and the Immunity of an Alleged President
...government to perpetuate the oppression of the population, reactivating rapidly and intensively the system of harassment and violent repression against real or perceived opponents (para. 34). Maduro self-proclaimed himself as the President claiming to enjoy all the sovereign prerogatives attached to the office even if he didn’t show any official data and proofs of his victory, violating the Venezuelan Constitution (Article 120). But international law confers immunity by virtue of office, not by self-proclamation, and under Venezuelan domestic law, virtue of office has to be recognized to the elected President...
08 Jul The Sum of Four Fears: African States and the International Criminal Court in Retrospect–Part II
...strategy of soliciting self-referrals and ‘selective, self-serving readings of the Statute’s complementarity provisions’, the Court and its supporters have deliberately sought to abandon the ‘horizontal framework’ contained in the Rome Statute (‘rooted in State consent and deferential to the State’s primacy of action regarding criminal prosecutions’) in favour of a ‘vertical framework [where]… the Court enjoys priority over the national jurisdiction, incorporating notions of superior supra-nationality as an international body and implying a relationship of authority by intervening in the domain of domestic affairs’. Such a shift would be the...27 Mar Cybersecurity at the WTO
...League Boycott against Israel–there has never been a case actually adjudicating the security exception. The reason is that Member States’s recognize that national security questions are self-judging. Each Member State decides for itself whether action is necessary for its essential security interests. Article XXI of GATT 1947 and Article XXIII of the Government Procurement Agreement both have such language. Baker focuses on the language in Article XXIII requiring that the procurement be “indispensable for national security or for national defence purposes.” But the operative language is that “[n]othing in this...
15 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: Conflicts of Interest in International Law Scholarship – Addressing An Indifference to Capitalist Imperialism
[Isa Blumi is Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University.] Dr. Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force (2021) charts how International Law’s founding generations of scholars sought relevance during times when the powerful adopted “the law” only when it suited their interests. By reading beyond the ‘emotional’, ‘cynical’, or ‘idealistic’ discourse that accompanied assertive claims about the distinctive eras of this Euro-American global order, Verdebout (pp. 213-319) methodically ‘deconstructs’ the self-serving discourse of 20th century scholars’ assumptions that they have improved...31 May More Relentless Self-Promotion: Ku on TV
All right, it’s not the Today Show, but for anyone in the New England area who might be interested (or curious what I sound like), I will be discussing Amnesty International’s recent human rights report on “Nite Beat with Barry Nolan” around 7:30 p.m. tonight on CN8, which is part of The Comcast Network. Also featured will be the head of Amnesty’s New England chapter....09 May A Thought Experiment About Complementarity and the Jordan Appeal Decision
...President to the ICC. Instead, exercising its right under Art. 17 of the Rome Statute, it prosecutes him for genocide itself. I see nothing in the Jordan appeal decision that rules out S3. If the ICC arrest warrant entitled Beta to arrest and surrender the President of Alpha to the ICC despite his HoS immunity, surely it entitled Beta to arrest the President and prosecute him itself. The principle of complementarity is a foundational part of the ICC’s jurisdictional regime. Beta has thus managed to evade HoS immunity simply by...
16 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: Mnemohistory and the Affective Life of International Law – A Method for the Madness
[Miriam Bak McKenna is Associate Professor of Law and Global Governance at Roskilde University, School of Social Science and Business. Her book Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill) was released in December 2022.] By now it is perhaps axiomatic to assert that the historical narratives surrounding international law are rather murky at best. As the canon of texts revisiting and critiquing these accounts expands, the creeping sense that international law finds itself in the midst of a George Santos style identity crisis continues to grow. History may be...
20 Jan The United Nations General Assembly Request to the International Court of Justice for an Advisory Opinion: (Some) Reflections
...life; trust/self-determination; and temporariness. The tests are international humanitarian law (IHL)-based, but they also include non-IHL rules, such as those pertaining to annexation, self-determination, and others. I note that the commission only summarizes its understanding of the test drawn up by Lynk and others, but shifts its focus to two indicators: permanence and annexation. When treated separately, acting contrary to these fundamental tenets would amount to (mostly) singular violations. When grouped together, they are seen as creating an unlawful situation (although for Lynk, the violation of one would seem to...
27 Jan The Russian Disinformation Campaign During the Romanian Presidential Elections: The Perfect Example of a Violation of International Law?
...of Internal Affairs, it is hard to say if there is enough evidence to attribute the responsibility for the breaches to Russia under international law (Art. 4-8 ARSIWA), and consequently to determine that Russia committed internationally wrongful act (Art. 2 ARSIWA). That in turn means that, to avoid violating international law itself, the safest option for Romania would be to limit itself to retorsions (as States often do in similar cases). When it comes to the reaction of international organizations, the European Commission has already opened formal proceedings against TikTok...