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18 Dec

[Shakuntala Banaji is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Ram Bhat is a PhD candidate in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and co-founder of Maraa, a media and arts collective in India.] In late 2018, WhatsApp awarded us one...

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17 Dec

[Shannon Raj Singh is an attorney specialized in international criminal law and human rights; she is currently a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford's Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict and an Associate Legal Officer at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the...

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17 Dec

[Barrie Sander is  a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil. This is the second part of a two-part post. Part one can be found here.] Rising concerns and frustrations about the role of Facebook in exacerbating tensions within conflict-affected and atrocity-afflicted communities have coincided with growing pressure for the platform to adhere to a human rights-based approach to content moderation....

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16 Dec

[Barrie Sander is  a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil. This is the first part of a two-part post. Part two can be found here.] During a speech delivered at Georgetown earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg proudly proclaimed that “our values at Facebook are inspired by the American tradition”. What Zuckerberg failed to mention is that only a tiny fraction...

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16 Dec

[Barrie Sander is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil and Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK.] In recent years, concerns have grown about the governance of the digital ecosystem and the social media platforms that have come to dominate it. The highly concentrated power and control of...

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13 Dec

[Catalina Fernández Carter is a Chilean lawyer and holds and LLM from the University of Cambridge.] According to the latest report by the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights, 241 individuals have suffered eye injuries – several of them resulting in partial or total blindness – in the context of the social unrest the country has experienced since October. Images of people with eye patches have become a...

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12 Dec

On 11 December 2019, Myanmar presented its case before the International Court of Justice, in the matter of provisional measures brought by The Gambia in relation to the Rohingya, under the Genocide Convention. Even though the hearings were for a specific determination – that of provisional measures – the arguments presented by Myanmar are a glimpse of the legal strategy...

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11 Dec

Yesterday The Gambia commenced its arguments in the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, relating to the application of the Genocide Convention and the Rohingya. After filing its application on 11 November, in which The Gambia initiated the case at the ICJ and also asked the court to order interim measures of protection, the hearings over three days are for a specific purpose – to...

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09 Dec

[Natasha Arnpriester an attorney with the Open Society Justice Initiative, where she focuses on criminal justice reform, anti-torture and citizenship. You can find her on Twitter: @NatashaArnpr] On 8 November 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and highest court for disputes between states, ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear Ukraine’s case against Russia for violations under...

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07 Dec

On Friday, the Assembly of States Parties unanimously adopted a Swiss proposal to extend the war crime of starvation to non-international armed conflict (NIAC). Previously, for reasons that seem to be largely accidental, the war crime only applied in international armed conflict (IAC). The new war crime is, of course, a welcome development. There is no justification for ever using starvation...

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04 Dec

As readers are no doubt aware, the OTP has once again declined -- now for a third time -- to open an investigation into Israel's violent attack on the MV Mavi Marmara. That decision was wholly expected; the only question was how the OTP would deal with the Appeals Chamber's recent decision in the Comoros situation, in which the Chamber...

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