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[Alexandra Hofer is a Doctoral Researcher at Ghent University, GRILI member. The topic addressed in this post is based on a paper entitled Promoting Threat: The Effect of European Union Restrictive Measures on the Development of International Law’s Enforcement, a Sociological Approach. All websites were last accessed on 5 July 2016.] The starting point of this post is related to the renewal...

There are lots of important issues implicated by this morning's above-the-fold story in the New York Times that U.S. officials and certain cybersecurity experts (e.g., Crowdstrike) have concluded Russian government agencies bear responsibility for hacking the Democratic National Committee's servers and leaking internal e-mails stored on them to Wikileaks (Russian responsibility for the hack itself was alleged more than a month ago)....

[Kenta Tsuda is an attorney at the non-profit law organization Earthjustice in Juneau, Alaska. Earthjustice was involved in the Pelly Amendment process described below in the post.] For millennia the peoples of southeast Alaska have prized the salmon harvests of the Taku, Stikine, and Unuk rivers, three transboundary waterways flowing from headwaters in British Columbia’s Coastal Range through Southeast Alaska to...

[This is the third episode in the Multi-blog series on the Updated Geneva Conventions Commentaries, jointly hosted by the Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog, Intercross and Opinio Juris. The first, by Jean-Marie Henckaerts, can be found here, and the second, by Sean Murphy, here.] It is a great pleasure to contribute to this multi-blog series on the ICRC’s newly-released Commentary on...

In addition to my posts here (see below), I have several  pieces over the last week discussing different aspects of the South China Sea award up at various outlets across the web universe (I know, I know, I need to stop writing about this topic, but indulge me just a little longer).  To briefly recap my various takes, here is a quick...

[Dr. Frederick Cowell is a Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London School of Law.] On the 6th of July the UK’s Iraq Enquiry report was finally published having taken almost seven years to complete. The process,  chaired by a leading former British civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, aimed to look at the causes and consequences of the 2003...

[Liu Haiyang is a research fellow at the Collaborative Innovation Center of South China Sea Studies, Nanjing University, China. This post was submitted to Opinio Juris under the auspices of the Chinese Initiative on International Law, an NGO with a mandate of promoting a better understanding of international law, particularly international criminal law and justice.] The ad hoc Arbitral Tribunal established...

The much-anticipated long awaited South China Sea Arbitration award on the merits is here!  It is a slam-dunk, complete, utter, massive, total legal victory for the Philippines on all counts (lots of metaphors here, none are quite sufficient). Essentially, the tribunal ruled in favor of almost all of the Philippines' claims in the arbitration.  Perhaps the most headline friendly result:...

In the second installment of episode 1 in this multi-blog series on the updated Commentaries, Professor Sean Murphy responds to Jean-Marie Henckaerts first post on locating the commentaries in the international legal landscape. Sean D. Murphy, Professor of International Law at George Washington University and Member of the U.N. International Law Commission, considers the role of the ICRC commentaries as a...

[Dr. Joanna Nicholson is a Researcher at PluriCourts – Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order at the University of Oslo.] For a crime to amount to a crime against humanity, it must be shown to have been part of a bigger picture, namely part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population....

William Gibson, repurposing a Gertrude Stein quip, said about cyberspace "there's no there, there" capturing the ethos of the internet as a place beyond the physical world of borders and jurisdiction.  Bitcoin melded cryptography and networked processing to attempt to make a currency that was not based in or controlled by any state. But the internet is based on servers and...