[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...
Every scholar, from the most junior to the most senior, has a horror story about the languorous pace of academic publishing. The journal that took six months to reject their article. The journal that took six months to ask them to revise and resubmit their article and then took another six months to reject the revisions. The journal that accepted...
[Indira Rosenthal is a legal consultant in international human rights law and international criminal law, with specialisms in women’s human rights, gender justice, law reform and access to justice. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, University of Tasmania, Australia, researching possible impacts of (mis)understandings of ‘gender’ on accountability for atrocity crimes at the ICC.] As the ICC ‘s third...
[Marnie Lloydd is Lecturer and Associate-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, with extensive experience in the international humanitarian sector.] Can there be ongoing duties to protect civilians once a state is no longer party to an armed conflict? A November 2021 decision of the High Court of New Zealand raised the possibility of ongoing legal, or at...
[Dr Ebba Lekvall is a Lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law and Human Rights Centre. Dr Melanie O’Brien is Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Western Australia and President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Dr Tara Van Ho is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law and Human...
In December 2021, I was asked to review evidence gathered by the Washington Post for a report on atrocities in Chin State, Myanmar – “Burn it all down” – and provided my analysis for the piece. This blogpost provides additional detail and a legal assessment of what has been occurring in Chin state, Myanmar. Much of the evidence on which...
When Telford Taylor was planning the trial programme for the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs), he was faced with a dilemma concerning the Nazis' pre-war mistreatment -- legal and physical -- of Jews and members of other despised groups. Unlike the London Charter, Control Council Law No. 10, the NMTs' enabling statute, did not require crimes against humanity to be committed...
[Dr Julie Fraser is an Australian lawyer and Assistant Professor with the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) and Montaigne Centre at Utrecht University.] The cultural frameworks into which we are socialised generally shape our worldview, including our taste in music or cuisine, definition of family, and conceptions of illness and wellbeing, their causes and remedies. Recognising this, the UN Committee...
[Álvaro Rueda Rodríguez-Vila is a graduate in law (Bachelor, UNED) and in human rights (LL.M., Maastricht University).] On 15 September, the Spanish Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional, or TC) barred a case from investigating and prosecuting crimes committed during the Franco dictatorship (a period of time known as franquismo, or Francoism). This decision, Auto 80/2021, refers to a complaint alleging tortures committed...