While results have not yet been officially announced, it is now a fact that Pedro Castillo, a rural farmer and schoolteacher from the town of Chota, in the northern Peruvian Andes, won Peru’s Presidential Election. Let me say this from the get-go: this is a historical moment. Peru is an immensely centralised, deeply racist country. Castillo’s meteoric rise to the...
The past few days have been dominated by the horrible images of destruction coming out of Palestine. As is painfully visible to anyone with an internet connection, Israel has been targeting residential and commercial buildings in Gaza under the argument that they are used by Hamas militants. As one tweet by the Israeli Defence Forces put it, according to Israel,...
International law has famously “turned to history”. Since then, what I like to call the “foundational myth” of international law has been poked, prodded, re-evaluated and re-told in powerful, unsettling and insightful ways. The publicist’s relation with their own discipline is no longer the same, and the colonial, often violent, roots of the rules we rely on every day, are increasingly more exposed and open...
I recently read Steven Wheatley’s latest paper, “Revisiting the Doctrine of Intertemporal Law” and found it incredibly interesting. As someone who shares Prof. Wheatley's interest in the intersection between law and history, I found his effort to systematise the concept into a practical method extremely welcomed and insightful. At the same time, his equation-like approach to “the law in the...
Judge Barrett is set to become Justice Barrett. Throughout her nomination process, I have been quite fascinated by the discussion surrounding her originalist views and originalism in general. As someone not used to originalism as a theory of Constitutional interpretation (it has not really caught on in Peru), this added exposure has offered me some new perspectives I had not previously considered, including originalism’s identity...
[in English at the end] Hace poco me tope con un podcast llamado "Hablemos de Derecho Internacional", conducido por Edgardo Sobenes, ex miembro del equipo legal de Nicaragua ante la CIJ. El podcast está repleto de excelentes entrevistas a algunos de los más renombrados publicistas de Hispanoamérica. Personalmente recomiendo la entrevista al Dr. Juan José Ruda, Profesor Principal en la Pontificia...
In 2018, Latin American states adopted the “Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean”, also known as the Escazú Agreement, for the city in Costa Rica were it was signed. The treaty sets out an obligation for Member States to legislate on these three matters under specific conditions, within the broader context of...
Unbeknownst to most Britons, UK-Peru relations are experiencing an unprecedented boon. Only last month, Boris Johnson addressed the Peruvian people through a video statement on Twitter – the first ever such message by a sitting British Prime Minister in Peru’s near-200-year history – highlighting the execution of a so-called “Government to Government (G2G) Agreement” to have British firms rebuild key Peruvian infrastructure destroyed by the El Niño...
I truly enjoyed reading Monica Hakimi’s “Making Sense of Customary International Law” (CIL). It is an exceptional paper, where Monica elegantly brings the entire concept of CIL back to the drawing board. The argument, I believe, can only be properly understood if the reader takes a few steps back and accepts that international law is a construct built by the assembling and disassembling of different legal...
In 2019, Bolivia saw one of its most turbulent political crises in recent memory. The OAS accused the government of committing electoral fraud to secure Evo Morales a controversial fourth term in office. One of the OAS’s main claims was that there had been a “drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing...
On May 3rd, a group of 60 Venezuelan expatriates and two American former Green Berets launched an operation to topple the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela. The operation looked more like something out of a bad streaming series than an actual military mission. Their plan was to arrive by boat at a fishing town north of the Capital, Caracas, somehow storm the heavily fortified...
[Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is currently Professor of International Law at Universidad del Pacífico Law School in Lima, Peru.] The COVID-19 pandemic can be understood through various different frameworks. It can be a vindication of anti-neoliberalism, a resurgence of nationalism, or even an opportunity to criticize or praise democracy and autocracy. The issue of framing is an increasingly important, if underestimated, meta-discussion...