In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Featured

06 Jul

[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.] There has been a flurry of discussion about the way in which the Rohingya community, particularly in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is receiving information about the various accountability mechanisms. On 7 June 2020 the Registry of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) reported...

|
05 Jul

[Carlos Rafael Urquilla Bonilla is a Senior Attorney at Inter-American Institute of Social Responsibility and Human Rights (IIRESODH)] In August 1936, husband and wife Antonio Alomar Mas and Margalida Jaume Vandrel were forcibly disappeared in Manacor (Mallorca) leaving two daughters behind at ages 8 and 11 amidst the Civil War. Their case is a paradigmatic example of the multiple gross human rights violations committed during the Spanish Civil...

|
05 Jul

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia. Part I can be found here.] A Collective Right to Existence Westphalian international law is not the best platform to address ‘dealing with the past’ issues (Koskenniemi). The Treaty of Westphalia itself contained a legal oblivion clause (Common Article II)...

|
05 Jul

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia.] Genocide Disparities and Grotian Moments International law has been credited for normalizing, theorizing, and proliferating several systemic injustices, being the ‘culprit and the remedy’(Stahn) of/for an imperialistic order premised on centers and peripheries (Anghie). Although, such statements offer a recapitulation of the use and...

|
02 Jul

[Maria Xiouri is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bedfordshire. Her book The Breach of a Treaty: State Responses in International Law was published by Brill in March 2021.] On 22 May 2020, the US submitted a notice of its intention to withdraw from the Treaty on Open Skies (‘OST’) to the Treaty Depositaries and to all other States parties to the Treaty (33...

|
01 Jul

[Arvind Ganesan is business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch.] The United Nations formally recognized a decade ago that businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights. It was a groundbreaking development. 10 years later, it’s clear that it was only a first step: we need laws that enforce companies’ duty to protect workers and communities from abuse and hold them accountable if they...

|
29 Jun

[Fiona de Londras is a Professor of Global Legal Studies at Birmingham University Law School. Ruth Houghton is an Assistant Professor at Newcastle University Law School and Aoife O'Donoghue is a Professor of International Law and Global Governance at Durham University Law School.] Being a feminist international lawyer is exhausting. We are not the first to say this, nor, sadly, will we be the last....

|
28 Jun

[Iain Scobbie is the Chair in International Law at the University of Manchester. This post is a contribution in our recent symposium on Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law.] The understanding and implications of common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions have undergone a transformation since its inception.  The volume edited by Eve Massingham and Annabel McConnachie, ‘Ensuring Respect for...

|
28 Jun

[Doug Cassel is Emeritus Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School.] The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this month in Nestle USA Inc. v. Doe that “general corporate activity” in the U.S. is not a sufficient domestic basis to warrant Alien Tort Statute (ATS) jurisdiction over claims against a U.S. corporation for alleged human rights violations overseas. The media response generally echoed that of the...

|
28 Jun

In my previous posts on the crime of ecocide -- Post 1, Post 2 -- I argued the theoretical/normative case against the IEP's decision to subject lawful acts to anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis via the "wantonness" requirement. In this post, I want to bracket the issue of whether the definition of ecocide should distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts and question...

|
26 Jun

In my previous post, I criticised the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide (IEP) for endorsing a definition that is unjustifiably anthropocentric. In particular, I criticised the idea that "knowingly" causing a substantial likelihood of either widespread or long-term severe environmental damage is not criminal unless it is "wanton," defined as "reckless disregard for damage which would...

|
25 Jun

As a teenager, I read Angela Davis, CLR James, Edward Said, Kwame Nkrumah, and Malcolm X. From a young age, I was perplexed by the contingency of global living standards, failing to comprehend why much of my national community (in Egypt) was mired in squalor while my adopted ones were swaddled in comfort. Each thinker linked contemporary privilege to historic...

|