In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Latin & South America

02 May

[Ricardo Arredondo is a Professor of International Law and Diplomacy (UBA-UP-UB).] As a consequence of the “coronavirus disease pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19)” (hereinafter “coronavirus”), the international community is facing a transcendental crisis that is likely to generate significant change in the international order as we know it. The pandemic has come to clearly and unquestionably remind us of the vulnerability of people and the planet to global...

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22 Apr

[Rocío Quintero is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Latin American Programme, based in Colombia. She tweets from. @___Dew___. Timothy Fish Hodgson is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Africa Programme based in South Africa. He tweets from @TimFish42.] As part 1 of this blog illustrated, the Colombian government has taken policy measures to ensure that the right to health of Venezuelans has...

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22 Apr

[Rocío Quintero is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Latin American Programme, based in Colombia. She tweets from @___Dew___. Timothy Fish Hodgson is a Legal Adviser for the ICJ’s Africa Programme based in South Africa. He tweets from @TimFish42.] The COVID-19 pandemic has, perhaps more starkly than ever before, brought to the fore the importance of the realization of human rights,...

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25 Feb

[Ciara Laverty is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Dieneke de Vos received her PhD in international criminal law from the European University Institute, Florence and currently works in the humanitarian sector on the prevention of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse.]   On 11 February 2020, Colombia’s Constitutional Court made public its full reasoning in the precedent-setting tutela action...

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17 Feb

Most readers will be familiar with the Caroline Affair. A group of Canadian rebels seized an American vessel and used it to transport ammunitions from the US to Canada. British forces raided the ship, burned it, killed two men, and sent its wreckage over the Niagara Falls. The incident gave rise to perhaps one of the most frequently quoted maxims in the law of use...

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23 Dec

[Marta Bo is a Researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague.] On 14 November 2019, Pre-Trial Chamber III (PTC III) authorized the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes allegedly committed against the Rohingya population (Article 15 Decision). This decision was unsurprising in light of the Jurisdiction Decision delivered by Pre Trial Chamber...

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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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10 Dec

If there is one thing we can agree on is that recognition of belligerency is in disuse – that it is a relic of the 19th century and that it died off sometime before the Spanish Civil War, right? Recognition of belligerency either “fell into desuetude” or is in a state of “current total disuse”. In fact, says Prof. Sivakumaran, “at least since 1949, and more...

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08 Nov

Over at Just Security, my friend Adil Haque has written a fantastic post on self-defense and non-state actors. Adil’s main point is that Article 51 of the UN Charter does not apply to armed attacks by non-state actors given its “Latin American origin”. He explains how it should be read in accordance with the Act of Chapultepec, which referred only to inter-state uses of force. I highly...

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25 Oct

[Nicolás Carrillo-Santarelli is a Colombian lawyer. He works as a researcher and lecturer of Public International Law at the La Sabana University, Colombia.] The morning of the 20th of October, Colombian media informed that the State of Colombia submitted an advisory opinion request to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights – which is not available in the webpage of the Court yet....

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21 Aug

[Camila Teran is a lawyer with a LLB in Law and a LLM in International Criminal Law, both from the University of Sussex.] The ICC’s current crisis bears witness to the contentious relationship between the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC (OTP) and States. The OTP’s progress is further frustrated by the small window triggering the admissibility phase that would allow the Prosecutor to formally investigate Colombia....

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