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18 Mar

[Melanie O’Brien, Associate Professor of International Law, University of Western Australia, is an award-winning IHL teacher and President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.] Following the news from Ukraine, the list of violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) being reportedly committed by Russia is like a checklist through the rules of IHL, particularly the First Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (API) (which Ukraine and Russia are both...

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17 Mar

[Lorenzo Gasbarri is Research Fellow and Lecturer of Public International Law at Bocconi University.] On Wednesday 2 March, for the first time since the creation of the United Nations, the General Assembly “deplore[d] in the strongest terms the aggression” committed by a permanent member of the Security Council against another UN member. Certainly, permanent members have violated the prohibition of the...

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17 Mar

[Ralph Wilde is a member of the Faculty of Law at University College London, University of London.] Over two decades ago, in 2000, a conference was held in London, entitled ‘international law and the Kosovo crisis’, concerning the NATO bombing of Serbia the year before. At that event, Professor, now Judge, Hilary Charlesworth, characterized international law as a ‘discipline of crisis’ in a presentation subsequently...

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16 Mar

[Marc Weller if Professor of International Law and International Constitutional Studies in the University of Cambridge, the former Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and of the European Centre for Minority Issues, a former United Nations Senior Mediation Expert and a Barrister (Middle Temple) at Doughty Street Chambers. He served as advisor in a large number of international...

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16 Mar

In an excellent recent blog post at Just Security, Tom Dannenbaum identified four options for prosecuting Russia's unprovoked aggression against Ukraine: [T]he International Criminal Court, an ad hoc international tribunal (whether along the lines proposed at Chatham House or pursuant to a General Assembly resolution), a domestic court exercising territorial jurisdiction (in Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine), or a domestic court exercising...

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15 Mar

[Mateusz Piątkowski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland (Faculty of Law and Administration, International Law Department), Attorney-at-law, and Member of the Polish Society of the Military Law and the Law of War. You can find Part I of this post here.] Under international law, military confrontations between states are measured by their intensity and gravity. To establish...

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15 Mar

[Mateusz Piątkowski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland (Faculty of Law and Administration, International Law Department), Attorney-at-law, and Member of the Polish Society of the Military Law and the Law of War. The author thanks Dr Tomasz Lachowski from University of Łódź, Poland and LtnCol. Dr Wojciech Mendel from the Polish Society of Military Law and...

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12 Mar

[Dr. Sava Janković is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, where he pursues research under the National Science Centre grant No 2020/37/K/HS5/02762. Professor Volker Roeben is the Dean and Professor of International Law at Durham Law School.] Background The Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, following President Yanukovych's...

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11 Mar

[Julia Emtseva is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Paul Emtsev is an independent public communication expert.] For Russia, the current war in Ukraine rests on the assumption that NATO’s Eastern enlargement is a threat to the country. For several months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned the West that deploying weapons or soldiers to Ukraine would...

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10 Mar

[Dr. Mona Paulsen is an Assistant Professor in International Economic Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.] Dramatic escalation of economic sanctions on the Russian Federation have made one thing clear – trade and security are no longer strange bedfellows. On 2 March 2022, Ukraine formally invoked the security exceptions of the World Trade Organization (Article XXI of the GATT 1994, Article XIVbis...

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10 Mar

[Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University (The Netherlands). He is a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute (Italy).] NATO and EU leaders present Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as a storied conflict between geopolitical power and a “rules-based order.”  In the hours that followed the invasion, EU Commission President, Ursula Von...

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09 Mar

[Moisés Montiel Mogollón is a lawyer advising individuals, companies, and States on matters of international law, human rights, and other international areas at Lotus Soluciones Legales. He is an Adjunct Professor of International Law at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and Universidad Panamericana (Guadalajara).] In the wake of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, which the UN General Assembly has already politically qualified as an act of...

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