Middle East

[Jessica Peake is the Director of the International and Comparative Law Program and the Assistant Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law.] The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was adopted during the 2005 World Summit to respond to four mass atrocity crimes – genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing – in the aftermath of states’ failures to...

[Shannon Raj Singh is a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford University, where she is researching the duty to prevent atrocity crimes with the Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict's Programme on International Peace and Security. Shannon is also an Associate Legal Officer at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the...

[Yasmine Nahlawi is an independent researcher specialising in R2P and its applicability to the Syrian and Libyan conflicts. She holds a PhD in Public International Law from Newcastle University, LLM in International Legal Studies from Newcastle University, and BSc in Political Science from Eastern Michigan University.] Throughout the Syrian conflict, I led policy initiatives for civilian protection alongside civil society leaders, iNGOs, and public officials within the...

This week, we have the honor of hosting a symposium on Yasmine Nahlawi's recent book, The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria: Mass Atrocities, Human Protection, and International Law. From the publisher: This book offers a novel and contemporary examination of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine from an international legal perspective and analyses how the doctrine was applied within...

[Solon Solomon is a Lecturer in the Division of Public and International Law at Brunel University London School of Law.] There is no question that Israel has an obligation to alleviate the health crisis that COVID-19 may trigger in the Gaza Strip. After all, according to the jurisprudential line taken by the Israeli Supreme Court, the State cannot allow the emergence of a humanitarian crisis in post-disengagement Gaza....

Last Thursday, Pre-Trial Chamber I issued its decision concerning which states, individuals ,and organizations will be permitted to submit observations on the OTP's request for a jurisdictional ruling in the Palestine situation. The PTC granted leave to 43 of the 45 potential amicus curiae. It denied one request (para. 52) because the individual who submitted it did so on behalf...

[Katherine Gallagher is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, where she focuses on holding individuals and corporations accountable for egregious human rights and international law violations. @katherga1. The views expressed in this post are made in my personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization I am currently or formerly associated with, nor the views...

[Jeff Handmaker teaches law, human rights and development and conducts research on legal mobilisation at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University in the Netherlands and is a senior research fellow in the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Alaa Tartir is a Research Associate at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, Switzerland and is a Program Advisor to Al-Shabaka:...

[John Quigley is Professor Emeritus at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.] In her Request to the Pre-Trial Chamber for a ruling on territorial jurisdiction, the Prosecutor raises the issue of Palestine’s statehood as a matter to be determined by the Pre-Trial Chamber. She writes, persuasively, that Palestine is a state. The matter was conclusively determined already by...

[Alice Panepinto is a lecturer in law at Queen’s University Belfast, where she researches and teaches human rights, international law and contemporary issues in property law.] In determining its territorial jurisdiction in Palestine, the ICC is presented with a golden opportunity to revive the global reach of international criminal justice. When Pre-Trial Chamber I will rule on the question of whether “the "territory" over which the...

[Mark Kersten is the founder of the blog Justice in Conflict. He is a Senior Researcher at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a student at McGill University’s Faculty of Law.] You would think it was reason to celebrate: there is a distinct possibility of an international court investigating alleged international crimes in a region of the...