Most readers will be familiar with the Caroline Affair. A group of Canadian rebels seized an American vessel and used it to transport ammunitions from the US to Canada. British forces raided the ship, burned it, killed two men, and sent its wreckage over the Niagara Falls. The incident gave rise to perhaps one of the most frequently quoted maxims in the law of use...
A couple of years ago, I helped GLAN and the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic prepare a 115-page communication to the OTP regarding Australia's unconscionable treatment of refugees and asylum seekers detained on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Here is the key paragraph from the Executive Summary: The communication finds that there is a reasonable basis...
[Rawan Arraf is an Australian lawyer and director of the Australian Centre for International Justice. This post represents the personal view of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Centre for International Justice.] This is a belated follow up to the introductory post in the matter of Taylor v Attorney General which concerned the attempted private...
[Dire Tladi is a Professor of International Law in the Department of Public Law, and a Fellow at the Institute of Comparative and International Law in Africa, at the University of Pretoria.] On 11 February 2020, the government of Sudan took the extraordinary (and yes surprising) decision to surrender the former President, Al Bashir, to Sudan. The attention that the “Al...
[Todd Carney is a student at Harvard Law School. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Communications. He has also worked in digital media in New York City and Washington D.C.] Over the last three years, the world has seen two European democracies, Slovakia and Malta, face major political scandals regarding the murder of a journalist in each...
[Hadi Dadmehr is a PhD candidate in Public International law at the National University of Iran (SBU). Hadi was Head of Law Department at the University of Zabol, Iran, for 6 years. You can find him on Twitter @HadiDadmehr.] Some nations are blessed with free, fair and reliable electoral process. Some would like to emulate their success, but there seems to be no opportunity. The recent electoral...
[ Luigi Daniele is Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Trent University, where he leads the undergraduate and postgraduate modules in International Humanitarian Law.] For more than a decade international lawyers have been debating Israel’s claim against the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the situation in Palestine, notoriously based on the argument that no Palestine State exists since ‘the Palestinian Authority lacks effective control over the...
[Katherine Gallagher is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, where she focuses on holding individuals and corporations accountable for egregious human rights and international law violations. @katherga1. The views expressed in this post are made in my personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization I am currently or formerly associated with, nor the views...
[Jeff Handmaker teaches law, human rights and development and conducts research on legal mobilisation at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University in the Netherlands and is a senior research fellow in the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Alaa Tartir is a Research Associate at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, Switzerland and is a Program Advisor to Al-Shabaka:...
[John Quigley is Professor Emeritus at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.] In her Request to the Pre-Trial Chamber for a ruling on territorial jurisdiction, the Prosecutor raises the issue of Palestine’s statehood as a matter to be determined by the Pre-Trial Chamber. She writes, persuasively, that Palestine is a state. The matter was conclusively determined already by...
[Alice Panepinto is a lecturer in law at Queen’s University Belfast, where she researches and teaches human rights, international law and contemporary issues in property law.] In determining its territorial jurisdiction in Palestine, the ICC is presented with a golden opportunity to revive the global reach of international criminal justice. When Pre-Trial Chamber I will rule on the question of whether “the "territory" over which the...
[Mark Kersten is the founder of the blog Justice in Conflict. He is a Senior Researcher at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a student at McGill University’s Faculty of Law.] You would think it was reason to celebrate: there is a distinct possibility of an international court investigating alleged international crimes in a region of the...