In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Europe

29 Sep

On 18 September, the Netherlands announced that it was initiating legal proceedings against Syria, based on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).  This move by the Netherlands brings many issues to the fore: the first is the scale and magnitude of torturebeing committed in Syria, documented in many reports and most recently in a court cases in Germany (under the aegis of...

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25 Sep

[Agata Kleczkowska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland.] Introduction On 9 August 2020, presidential elections were held in Belarus, governed since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko. This time, however, Belarusians did not believe in the overwhelming victory of the authoritarian president, and, certain of the victory of the opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, began mass...

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17 Aug

[Julia Emtseva is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.] Belarus, a country known as “Europe’s last dictatorship”, held a presidential election on 9 August amid decreasing support of Lukashenko’s leadership. According to election officials, he won 80.23% of the vote, while his main opponent, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, received 9.9%. Belarusians, however, said that election results were rigged. Ms. Tikhanovskaya rejected the...

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10 Jul

Unbeknownst to most Britons, UK-Peru relations are experiencing an unprecedented boon. Only last month, Boris Johnson addressed the Peruvian people through a video statement on Twitter – the first ever such message by a sitting British Prime Minister in Peru’s near-200-year history – highlighting the execution of a so-called “Government to Government (G2G) Agreement” to have British firms rebuild key Peruvian infrastructure destroyed by the El Niño...

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10 Jul

[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...

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10 Jul

[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...

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07 Jul

[María Clara Galvis Patiño teaches international human rights law at Universidad Externado de Colombia and United Nations Human Rights System at the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University in Washington D.C. She was a member of the Committee on enforced disappearances (CED) from 2015 to 2109. Rainer Huhle is a board member of the Nuremberg Human...

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07 Jul

Call for Papers Special Edition: The Business and Human Rights Regime in the Americas: The Revista Internacional de Derechos Humanos (RIDH) is pleased to announce a call for papers for the Special Edition of The Business and Human Rights Regime in the Americas. Given that the Special Rapporteur for Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights...

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22 Jun

[Gabriella Citroni is Senior Researcher in International Law and Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She is also senior legal advisor of the NGO TRIAL International. Aintzane Márquez is Senior Attorney at Women’s Link Worldwide. Both organizations work to ensure that crimes committed against women and girls during wartime, under dictatorships and in context of oppression...

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16 Jun

[Andreina De Leo is a Legal Researcher at the European Legal Support Center (ELSC).] On June 11, 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (ECt.HR) delivered the much-awaited judgement Baldassi and Others v. France (application no. 15271/16). The Court found by a majority that there was no violation of Article 7 (no punishment without law) and unanimously that there was a...

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28 May

Analyzing the issue of religious discrimination in counterterrorism laws requires first, to look at the facts: whereas many cases brought to justice until the years 2000s concerned Corsican and Basque separatists[1], people indicted for acts of terrorism today are mostly identified as (radicalized) Islamists.  Moreover the attacks of February and November 2015 led to a point of no return where terrorism...

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22 May

[Andreas Schueller directs the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).] The current German coalition agreement says that the German government “categorically rejects extrajudicial killings, also by drones”. Nevertheless, the German armed forces leased drones that can be armed – yet without the respective weapons. The German government declared that it will employ these drones only in accordance to...

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