Recent Posts

A Comment on Shiri Krebs’ chapter “The Invisible Frames Affecting Wartime Investigation: Legal Epistemology, Metaphors, and Cognitive Biases” [Emiliano J. Buis is a Professor of Public International Law at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and at the Central University of the Province of Buenos Aires (UNICEN), and researcher at the National Research Council for Science and Technology (CONICET)] Introduction Shiri...

[María Vásquez Callo-Müller is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Lucerne, working for the Trade Law 4.0 project (Trade Law for a Data-Driven Economy). Iryna Bogdanova is a Fellow at the World Trade Institute (WTI), University of Bern. She holds a Ph.D. degree (2020) from the WTI.] Since recently, cyber sanctions – unilateral economic restrictions punishing actors responsible for malicious cyber-enabled behavior...

Introduction to the Symposium on Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch (eds), International Law’s Invisible Frames: Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes (OUP 2021) [Alexandra Hofer is an assistant professor in public international law at Utrecht University and affiliated researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI)] In their thought-triggering project, Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch bring together sixteen chapters that, each in...

Recently, US President Joe Biden gave a press conference where he was asked about the US’ approach to Latin America. In an I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-this moment, Biden responded as follows: “We used to talk about, when I was a kid, in college, about ‘America’s Backyard’. It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is ‘America’s Front Yard’. And we’re equal...

On 19 January 2022, the legendary investigator and justice warrior Frank Kennan Dutton passed away at the age of 72. I was introduced to Frank  by Howard Varney while we were all working on seeking justice for anti-apartheid activist Nokuthula Simelane who was tortured and murdered by apartheid era police. Naturally, Frank’s reputation preceded him and I had heard awe-inspiring things about him but I...

Featured Announcement The British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) provides training that combines world leading research with an applied perspective. Our courses are designed to enable legal practitioners, government officials, students, academics, and civil society organisations to deepen their knowledge and gain expert insights in areas of international law.  Building on the successes of 2021, for spring 2022, BIICL is delighted to launch a...

Every nine-years a new prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is selected. The 2021/2020 ICC prosecutorial elections saw the appointment of the ICC’s third prosecutor and an unprecedented discussion about the high moral character requirement. Common sense and article 42(3) of the Rome Statute require the prosecutor and deputies to be persons of high moral character, yet this election cycle...

Call for Papers Call for abstracts - International Law Association British Branch Spring Conference: On Friday, 29 April 2022, the University of Surrey will host the annual Spring Conference in hybrid mode on the theme of ‘International Law and Climate Change’. The Conference will feature a mixture of invited and selected speakers on the following panels: impact of rising sea levels...

[David J. Scheffer is a former US diplomat, an international law professor, and a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He is author of The Sit Room: In the Theater of War and Peace.] Legal principles matter as two major democracies—Taiwan and Ukraine—are threatened by superpower neighbors. Whether one argues about Taiwan’s status as a country or a province...

[Kent Roach, CM, FRSC is Professor of Law at the University of Toronto and the author of 15 books including Remedies for Human Rights Violations: A Two-Track Approach to Supra-National and National Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).] I am grateful to Kristen Boon for her thoughtful engagement with my new book and the remedial dilemmas that she poses and examines. This confirms my...

[Kristen Boon is a Professor at Seton Hall Law School and a Visiting Academic at Global Affairs Canada. All views expressed are those of the author.] Kent Roach’s new book Remedies for Human Rights Violations: A Two-Track Approach to Supra-National and National Law celebrates the creativity of international law with regards to remedies. He writes: “a central theme of this book is that...

[Alexander Hinton (@AlexLHinton) is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. He is author or editor of sixteen books, including It Can Happen Here (NYU, 2021), The Justice Facade (Oxford, 2018), and the forthcoming Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell, 2022)] On 17 August 1946, as the Nuremberg trials were underway, Hannah...