A few months ago, I participated as a senior faculty member at the Fourth Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law in Florence, Italy. It was a fantastic workshop, and the papers presented by the junior faculty were uniformly excellent, including the one by Maria Varaki to which I responded. So I encourage all young scholars to submit abstracts for the Fifth...
Well, this is a tad embarrassing for the British government. A prosecution of a Swedish national for providing support to Syrian rebels fell apart when...
The inestimable Mark Kersten devotes his new column at Justice Hub (ignore the scary portrait) to an unusual issue: whether international criminals should be able to pursue higher education once they are released from prison. The column focuses on Thomas Lubanga, who recently stated his desire to complete a PhD at Kisengani University after he is released. Here is Mark's takeaway,...
A few months ago, I blogged about the OTP's attempt to invoke Regulation 55 in Laurent Gbagbo's trial. As I noted in that post, the OTP asked the Trial Chamber (TC) to consider convicting Laurent Gbagbo of various crimes against humanity on the basis of command and superior responsibility, even though the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) specifically refused to confirm those modes of liability because doing so “would require...
The journal has published what has to be the most ridiculous article in the history of IHL scholarship. And no, I'm not being hyperbolic. Written by someone named William C. Bradford, identified -- terrifyingly -- as an "Associate Professor of Law, National Security, and Strategy, National Defense University, Washington, D.C," it's entitled "Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict...
Regular readers might remember a debate here and at Just Security (links here) in which I and a number of others debated whether it was perfidious for Mossad to use a booby-trapped civilian SUV to kill Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah's intelligence chief, in a Damascus suburb. I am pleased to announce that International Law Studies, the official journal of the US Naval War College,...
My colleague Anne Orford has just received -- and deservedly so -- a very significant Australian Laureate Fellowship for a program entitled Civil War, Intervention, and International Law. The program is funded by the Australian Research Council from 2015 to 2020 and will establish an interdisciplinary research team based at Melbourne Law School. Here is a snippet from the description of the program: Professor Orford’s...
Anna, who has guest-blogged for us in an academic capacity on a number of occasions (see here, here, and here), has just started a new job as Georgia's Deputy Minister for Defence. See if you can spot her in this photo: Heartfelt congratulations to Anna. Academia's loss is Georgia's gain. I have no doubt that she will do exemplary work on behalf of...
My favourite entry in the "funny placement coincidences" competition: I have no political point to make. I just think the photo is fantastic....
No matter how many times I read the decision, I keep coming back to this paragraph: 51. As a final note, the Chamber cannot overlook the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the Prosecutor’s conclusion that the identified crimes were so evidently not grave enough to justify action by the Court, of which the raison d’être is to investigate and prosecute...
Here is the first sentence of Avi Bell's new editorial in the Times of Israel: The Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court, for the first time in its history, has ordered the ICC Prosecutor to pursue an investigation she has decided to close. Nope. You'd think a law professor might make an effort to understand the Comoros review decision before breathlessly intoning "The...
In late 2014, the Office of the Prosecutor rejected a request by Comoros to open a formal investigation into Israel's attack on the Mavi Marmara. To my great surprise, the Pre-Trial Chamber (Judge Kovacs dissenting) has now ordered the OTP to reconsider its decision. The order does not require the OTP to open a formal investigation, because the declination was based...
