In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

31 Aug

[Clive Vella is Data Manager at Airwars, a not-for-profit transparency watchdog which tracks, assesses, archives and investigates civilian harm claims in conflict-affected nations.  Shoeb Abdullah is a digital rights activist and OSINT investigator based in Bangladesh. He is co-founder of the Bangladesh Protest Archive, an initiative dedicated to preserving, documenting and investigating gross human rights abuses around democratic protest.  Kartika Pratiwi is...

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31 Aug

[Mei Ching Liu is an Associate Research Fellow with the Military Transformations Programme (MTP) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore.] All views expressed in this post are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of RSIS. The UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) will meet later this month...

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31 Aug

[Georgia Edwards leads Visual Investigations at WITNESS as a Training and Partnerships Manager.] Over the past decade, the rise in community-filmed evidence, OSI (open-source information) and visual investigations has brought methodologies and models that have profoundly reshaped human rights investigations, yet the most visible investigative labs, methodological standards and verification infrastructures are still embedded in Global North newsrooms, universities and NGOs....

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28 Aug

[Yousuf Syed Khan is a Manager, Law and Policy at Legal Action Worldwide in Geneva. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council (Strategic Litigation Project), and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism - The Hague. Jérôme de Hemptinne is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University.] In Part I of this post, we clarified which legal regimes...

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28 Aug

[Yousuf Syed Khan is a Manager, Law and Policy at Legal Action Worldwide in Geneva. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council (Strategic Litigation Project), and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism - The Hague. Jérôme de Hemptinne is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University.] We read with real interest Alexandria Virginski’s recent post, Behind Enemy...

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28 Aug

[Rashmi Raman is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law, National University of Singapore.] In January this year, on this blog, Christine Ryan, Richard Dicker and Akshaya Kumar urged supportive States to resist what they called premature minimalism, warning that limiting proposals to what nearly all member States might accept “risks pointless concessions and irreparably weakening the text”. The...

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28 Aug

[Netta Goussac is Associate Senior Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Special Counsel at Lexbridge.] Editorial Note: This post forms the third of three posts of the Opinio Juris mini-symposium on the upcoming meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems within the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. A version...

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28 Aug

[Michael John-Hopkins is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of The Rule of Law in Crisis and Conflict Grey Zones (Routledge, 2016) and a co-author of Malign Information Psychological Operations: Concepts, Law, and Strategy (Routledge, forthcoming 2027).] In July 2025, in Bradshaw and Others v United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights confronted a tension between...

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27 Aug

[Ambassador Alexander Kmentt is an Austrian career diplomat, currently serving as Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations Office and to the Specialized Institutions in Geneva. He has worked extensively on disarmament and non-proliferation issues and is one of the architects of the initiative on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons...

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27 Aug

[Claire Beutter is a PhD Candidate in International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute.] Writing for the New York Times in 1965, Hans Morgenthau expressed his hope that the “vaunted pragmatism and common sense of the American mind” would correct the dangerous misconceptions driving US involvement in Vietnam, “before they lead us from the blind alley in which we find ourselves...

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27 Aug

[Dorothea Anthony is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Wollongong, Australia.] When the United States and Israel initiated military action against Iran in June 2025 and February 2026, one response from Iran was to target US foreign military bases. It struck these bases situated in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,...

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27 Aug

[Hassan Khoder, LL.M., is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Cologne in Germany specialising in autonomous cyber weapons and international humanitarian law. His working papers are available on SSRN.] The Vote That Has Not Been Adequately Analysed On 1 December 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 80/57 on lethal autonomous weapons systems by 164 votes in favour...

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