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05 Sep

PassBlue published a very disturbing article yesterday about nominations for five vacant UN Special Rapporteur positions. According to the article, although the President of the Human Rights Council, South Korea's Choi Kyonglim, has endorsed four of the selection committee's five first choices, he has refused to endorse its first choice for Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Karim...

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05 Sep

[Ralph Mamiya is team leader for the Protection of Civilians Team in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations but writes here in a purely personal capacity, and the views expressed do not represent official positions of his Department or the United Nations.] The protection of civilians is both a well-established topic in international law and also a relatively new and controversial...

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05 Sep

[Grazyna Baranowska is a Senior Researcher at the Poznań Human Rights Centre of the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.] The nature of enforced disappearances is that it affects whole families, rather than only the individuals who disappeared. While the majority of the forcibly disappeared are men, these disappearances have a strong economic, socials and psychological effects on the...

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29 Aug

[Amina Adanan is a PhD candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, NUI Galway.]  In common law and civil law legal systems it is the responsibility of the public prosecutor to determine whether the prosecution of an international crime is pursued. The level of this discretionary power and the considerations to be taken into account in making the...

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23 Aug

Defense One points to a news story in the Baghdad Post that the Iraqi Security Forces may be preparing to deploy a ground-combat robot: Loosely dubbed Alrobot — Arabic for robot — it has four cameras, an automatic machine gun, and a launcher for Russian-made Katyusha rockets, and can be operated by laptop and radio link from a kilometer away, the...

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18 Aug

[Dr Myriam Feinberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions, University of Haifa. The topic addressed in this blog post is based on her monograph Sovereignty in the Age of Global Terrorism – The Role of International Organisations published by Brill/Martinus Nijhoff in May 2016.] The attacks of 9/11 brought terrorism to the international stage. They...

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16 Aug

[Jenny Poon is a Doctoral Candidate at the Faculty of Law of Western University, Canada and a Barrister & Solicitor in Ontario, Canada. The topic addressed in this post is based on a paper entitled State Discretion on Asylum Claims Procedures: Violation or Adherence to Non-Refoulement? All websites were accessed on 22 July 2016. The author would like to thank...

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11 Aug

[John Coyle is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.] On June 14, 2016, the Islamic Republic of Iran initiated proceedings against the United States before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), alleging that the United States had violated the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights (“Treaty”) between the two nations.  Iran claimed,...

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09 Aug

[Andrea Bowdren (LLM (LSE), BCL International (NUI)) is a trainee solicitor at Arthur Cox in Dublin, Ireland. All views are the author's own.] The trial of Ahmed Al Faqi Al Mahdi before the International Criminal Court represents a series of firsts for international law and justice. Al Mahdi is the first individual from Mali brought before the International Criminal Court, the first...

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05 Aug

[Wolfgang Alschner (PhD in International Law, JSM (Stanford)) is a post-doctoral researcher at the World Trade Institute in Bern and the Graduate Institute in Geneva specializing in text as data analysis of international law.] As international law scholars we are overwhelmed with information. The United Nations Treaty Series alone contains more than 50,000 treaties. Add to that the many thousand decisions by...

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04 Aug

[Ekaterina Kopylova is a PhD candidate at MGIMO-University, Moscow, and a former Legal Assistant with the ICC Office of the Prosecutor.] On July 15, 2016, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) Contempt Judge Nicola Lettieri entered a guilty verdict against two co-accused standing trial for designedly violating confidentiality of several purported Prosecution witness identities in the case of Ayyash, et al....

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04 Aug

[Shehzad Charania was the Legal Adviser and Head of International Law at the British Embassy in The Hague between January 2013 and August 2016.  The views set out in this article are personal, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the British Embassy or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.] Earlier this year, the King of the Netherlands opened the new...

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