[Kate Mackintosh is the Executive Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law, and was deputy co-chair of the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide.] In an exciting development for proponents of a new international crime of ecocide, the European Parliament on Tuesday agreed a text for the new Environmental Crimes Directive (“Draft...
[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. He has recently published The Democratisation of the European Union.] Seventy years after the start of the experiment with pooling sovereignty, the European Union turns out to embody the most significant innovation of the modern state system so far. The hallmark of the EU in its present form is that it...
A few days ago, the European Law Institute published its final report on ecocide. The report not only provides a definition of ecocide, it also contains Model Rules for an EU Directive and a Council Decision that ELI hopes will both "contribute to the inter-institutional negotiations in the EU on the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and...
[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. His new book: The Democratisation of the European Union will be published in January 2023 by The Hague Eleven.] Seventy years after the start of the process of European integration, the EU is still being portrayed by politicians and academics alike as an ‘unsolvable conundrum’. Despite strenuous efforts, theorists have...
Via its Minister for the Environment, the Belgian government has announced that it intends to incorporate the crime of ecocide into its Penal Code: A concept now recognized in the national penal codes of 10 countries (Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Vietnam and France), the crime of ecocide refers to all illegal actions that lead to the...
[Tiina Pajuste is Professor of International Law and Security at Tallinn University. She has held previous research positions at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights (University of Helsinki) and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (University of Cambridge), where she was part of the Legal Tools for Peace-making Project. The views expressed in this paper are...
Until this summer, Brigid Laffan was director and professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and director of the Global Governance Programme at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, where she has worked since 2013. In 2018, Politico ranked Laffan, a long time professor of political science who grew up in Ireland, among the women who shape Europe....
[Jed Odermatt is Lecturer at the City Law School, City, University of London, where he is co-convenor of the International Law and Affairs Group (ILAG) and member of the Institute for the Study of European Law (ISEL). The opinions expressed herein are the author’s alone.] The Russian Federation has demanded that Ukraine should renounce potential NATO membership. Early on in the...
[Oleksandr Vodiannikov, PhD, LLM, is a member of Ukraine’s Law Reform Commission and previously served as a member of Ukraine’s Judicial Reform Council and of the Constitutional Commission.] The cost of war for the Ukrainian economy, infrastructure, and the population is spiraling every day as the ensuing devastation grinds on. The bill to be paid for the reconstruction of Ukraine's shattered...
[Danya Chaikel is currently consulting with FIDH's International Justice Desk and is the Co-Vice Chair of the IBA’s War Crimes Committee.] This amicus curiae brief was submitted by: Louise Arimatsu, Adejoké Babington-Ashaye, Danya Chaikel, Christine Chinkin, Carolyn Edgerton, Angela Mudukuti, and Cynthia T. Tai.* Following the Ongwen Appeals Chamber’s (AC) invitation to scholars and legal practitioners we submitted an amicus brief contending that duress and sexual violence...
[Walter Kemp is Director of the Global Strategy against Transnational Organized Crime at the Global Initiative against Organized Crime, a former Senior Adviser at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and former Vice President of the International Peace Institute. He also teaches at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. He is author of Security through Cooperation: To the Same...
[Karolína Babická is a legal adviser with the International Commission of Jurists.] The EU, in a historical move, has for the first time decided to activate the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD), immediately after the Russian aggression in Ukraine started on 24 February. By 2 March there was already a proposal by the European Commission to activate the Directive, and on 4 March, the...