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And so it begins. According to a leading Kenyan paper, Kenya has rejected the four candidates identified by the ICC's Committee on the Election of the Prosecutor: "Kenya anticipated that the Committee would present a shortlist of qualified candidates with an equal chance of being elected. The current shortlist does not meet this expectation and appears skewed in favour of a...

[Bruno Stagno-Ugarte is the Deputy Executive Director (Advocacy) at Human Rights Watch.] Human rights violations committed by the United Kingdom on a remote 53 square kilometer archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean may be hampering its ability to take credible action to protect the Rohingya from ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and the fundamental freedoms of Hong Kong from encroaching China. In 1965,...

[Nora Salem is Assistant Professor and Head of the Public International Law Department at the German University in Cairo with a research focus on Women’s Human Rights in the Middle East. She has recently published an entry for the MPEPIL on Sharia Reservations to Human Rights Treaties, as well as a book on The Impact of the UN Women’s Rights Convention on Egypt’s Domestic Legislation (Brill).] After the WHO’s characterization of...

[Liemertje Julia Sieders is a New-York qualified attorney, working as an in-house Compliance & International Sanctions Specialist with a multinational company in Rome, Italy. She writes on gender and corporate liability issues as Senior Contributor with the CSR Blog.] Part I of this post looked at how the final version of the EU Whistleblowing Directive 2019/1937 adopted last year fails to include gender equality and anti-discrimination, either as...

[Liemertje Julia Sieders is a New-York qualified attorney, working as an in-house Compliance & International Sanctions Specialist with a multinational company in Rome, Italy. She writes on gender and corporate liability issues as Senior Contributor with the CSR Blog.] On 23 October 2019, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted the long-awaited Directive 2019/1937 on the protection of persons who report breaches of...

06.07.20 | 0 Comments| Edit [Monica Hakimi is the James V. Campbell Professor of Law at Michigan Law School.] Preview of Monica's reply to critics https://t.co/5IAtPghkyA pic.twitter.com/db4Mr9S7yN— Adil Haque (@AdHaque110) July 6, 2020 Thanks again to all the contributors to this symposium. It’s hugely rewarding to have such an extraordinary group of international lawyers and scholars engage with my work. It’s all the more rewarding...

I truly enjoyed reading Monica Hakimi’s “Making Sense of Customary International Law” (CIL). It is an exceptional paper, where Monica elegantly brings the entire concept of CIL back to the drawing board. The argument, I believe, can only be properly understood if the reader takes a few steps back and accepts that international law is a construct built by the assembling and disassembling of different legal...

[Jean d’Aspremont is the Chair in Public International Law at the University of Manchester.] That international lawyers constantly feel a need to revisit their doctrinal fundamentals is no sign that the international legal discipline is running out of steam (and out of inspiration). Even if international lawyers feel the world is crumbling in front of them and demanding urgent interventions, there...

[Martin Scheinin is a Professor of International Law and Human Rights at European University Institute and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism.] Professor Monica Hakimi’s article ’Making sense of customary international law’ is both rewarding and thought-provoking. It fully merits this Symposium. She makes a convincing case that most if not all mainstream doctrinal writing on the topic has serious flaws. She rightly criticizes...

[Jutta Brunnée is University Professor and Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto.] With her provocative new article Making Sense of Customary Law, Monica Hakimi challenges doctrinalists as well as theorists of international law to engage in a sophisticated conversation about a classical problem: how do we know when customary international law (CIL) exists as “a general practice...

Introduction Monica Hakimi’s new article, “Making Sense of Customary International Law,” is my favourite kind of scholarship: bold, critical, revisionist, tendentious. Too few scholars are brave enough to confront the sacred cows of public international law this forthrightly, and for that reason alone Hakimi deserves our thanks and praise. That said, I disagree with nearly every word in Hakimi’s article. An adequate response would require an article of its...

[David Stewart is Professor from Practice; Co-Director, Global Law Scholars Program; Director, Center on Transnational Business and the Law at Georgetown Law.] As a general proposition, the law prizes clarity, precision and certainty.  Tolerance of ambiguity is not a virtue taught in most law school classrooms.  That’s one reason why beginning students of international law often find it difficult to grasp...