[Rachel López is an associate professor of law at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.] Gravity is a concept that is frequently invoked in international spaces,...
[Tasha Manoranjan, Esq. is the Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The views expressed here are PEARL's and do not represent the Commission's. Meruba Sivaselvachandran is a rising second-year student in the JD/MBA program at University of Toronto and a Legal Intern at PEARL.] Introduction The...
I greatly appreciate Evelyn Ankumah (Africa Legal Aid) and James Goldston (OSJI) taking the time to respond to my post about the upcoming election for ICC Prosecutor. Unfortunately, their post barely addresses any of the concerns I raised about the process the Committee used to shortlist four candidates. Instead, it simply reiterates the view put forth in the Joint Civil...
[Evelyn Ankumah is the Executive Director of Africa Legal Aid (AFLA). James Goldston is the Executive Director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.] Next Thursday and Friday mark an important step in the process to elect a new ICC prosecutor. After six months of hard work by the Committee for the Election of the Prosecutor (CEP) and amidst growing curiosity, states and civil society...
[Kiran Mohan Vazhapully is Legal Officer at the Secretariat of Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO), New Delhi. Currently, he is on leave specializing in air and space law at McGill University, where he is an Erin J.C. Arsenault Fellow.] Last month, based on a Reuters report, Chris Borgen wrote in this blog about the White House chalking out details of a...
[Deepak Raju is a senior associate at Sidley Austin LLP, Geneva. The views expressed in this article are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sidley Austin LLP and its partners.] The “non-incidental” consequence of “incidental” jurisdiction: Where the tail wags the dog On the merits of the dispute, the parties disagreed on whether India had violated...
[Deepak Raju is a senior associate at Sidley Austin LLP, Geneva. The views expressed in this article are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sidley Austin LLP and its partners.] An arbitral tribunal established under Annex VII to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”), in the Enrica Lexie dispute between...
In response to rumblings that states are less than overwhelmed by the four candidates the Committee on the Election of the Prosecutor has selected, civil society organizations are mounting a concerted effort to dissuade states from considering new candidates. The best example is a recent "Joint Civil Society Statement" signed by nine leading human-rights organizations, including Open Society Justice Institute,...
[Verity Robson is the Legal Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of the United Kingdom to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Geneva. A longer version of this article first appeared in the Journal for Conflict and Security Law, Volume 25 Issue 1.] With last month’s publication online of the ICRC’s impressive new Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention, it’s worth revisiting initial reactions to the volumes...
[Tamsin Phillipa Paige is a Lecturer with Deakin Law School and consults for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in relation to Maritime Crime.] [Recently Opinio Juris hosted a symposium on Professor Monica Hakimi’s latest article in the Michigan Law Review, “Making Sense of Customary International Law”, and her argument that the rulebook approach isn’t reflective of how CIL functions, and...
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,...