[This letter was sent to the editors of the Journal of the History of International Law on 29 August 2017. I am a signatory, not the letter's author.] Dear Editors, We are writing to express our grave concern about the publication of an article entitled ‘The Forgotten Genocide in Colonial America: Reexamining the 1622 Jamestown Massacre within the Framework of the UN...
Over the next three days we will be featuring an online discussion of my SOAS colleague and TAU law professor Aeyal Gross's new book for Cambridge University Press, The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (CUP, 2017). The book develops ideas that Aeyal discussed on Opinio Juris -- in a symposium on the functional approach to occupation -- more...
I am delighted to release the call for papers for a workshop I am organising with Ingo Venzke, my fantastic colleague at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. The workshop is entitled "Contingency in the Course of International Law: How International Law Could Have Been" and will feature an opening address by Fleur Johns (UNSW) and a closing address by Sam Moyn...
Here is CUP's statement: Kudos to CUP for doing the right thing. And kudos to everyone -- including Jan Klabbers -- who took a public stand against CUP's capitulation to Chinese pressure. UPDATE: True to form, China is now censoring news of CUP's decision not to censor!...
Saudi-owned TV news network Al Arabiya aired a video simulation yesterday that shows a Saudi Arabian fighter shooting an air-to-air missile at a Qatari Airways plane. Here is the video: That's bad enough -- but what is truly horrifying is the accompany voiceover, which intones the following: International law permits states to shoot down any aircraft that violates a state’s airspace, classing...
Snapshot of two days in the life of the ICC. On Tuesday, the ICC issued a new arrest warrant in the Libya situation -- for Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a commander in the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), which defected from the Libyan army during the revolution and is currently vying for power with the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The arrest warrant represents...
I have happy news to report: after a groundswell of support, my student Tamara Tamimi has been granted a visa to attend her SOAS graduation. Apparently her Facebook post garnered more than 700 reactions, leading to letters and emails flooding into the Home Office. I want to thank each and every person who supported Tamara -- whether through a letter, an...
I opened Facebook just now to find the following post from my brilliant student at SOAS, Tamara Tamimi, whose MA dissertation -- written under my supervision -- received the law school's award for the best MA dissertation of the year: I am angry, frustrated and sad. I was denied entry clearance into the UK to attend my graduation from SOAS University of...
As many readers are probably aware, the ACLU is currently bringing an ATS action against the two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Jessen, who allegedly designed and administered the CIA's torture program. Here is the ACLU's summary of the case, Salim v. Mitchell: The CIA paid the two men and the company they later formed tens of millions of dollars over the...
When last we met William Bradford, he had just published an article in the National Security Law Journal (NSLJ) accusing centrist national-security-law professors of treason and advocating prosecuting them for providing material support to terrorists. After many scholars, including me, pointed out that the article was both absurd and deeply offensive, the NSLJ repudiated the article. (Alas, the journal has since scrubbed the...
One of the most basic assumption of ICL is that an act cannot be a war crime unless it violates a rule of international humanitarian law (IHL). Article 6(b) of the London Charter criminalised "War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war." Article 3 of the ICTY Statute provides that "[t]he International Tribunal shall have the power to prosecute...
Last month, I blogged about the Syria War Crimes Accountability Act of 2017, a bipartisan Senate bill “[t]o require a report on, and to authorize technical assistance for, accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Syria.” I praised the bill, but pointed out that Section 7(a) was drafted in such a way that it permitted the US to provide technical...
