Themes

[Tun Khin is President of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK and Tomás Ojea Quintana is a former UN Special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.] On 18 August, in a court in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, six women made history in the Rohingyas’ long struggle for justice. For the first time anywhere in the world, Rohingya victims of...

[Jennifer Keene-McCann is Fellow, Research and Policy at the Asia Justice Coalition and is based in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia.] As international lawyers we have many tools at our disposal to assist survivors of international crimes in a way that is meaningful and reflective of their experience.  Consider the atrocities against the Rohingya. Four years on from the latest iteration of violence, there has...

[Antonia Mulvey is the Executive Director of Legal Action Worldwide (LAW).] On 13 September 2021, Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) – with international law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton – filed a ground-breaking communication with the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on behalf of 500 Rohingya clients victims of the 2017 so-called “clearance operations, in which thousands of Rohingya were killed, tortured...

[Grant Shubin is the Legal Director at The Global Justice Center (GJC).] Of the many perspectives offered by outside observers in the wake of the Myanmar military’s (Tatmadaw’s) attempted coup, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights cogently cut to the core of it: “This crisis was born of impunity.”  As if to tacitly acknowledge this fact, in his first speech since...

[Valerie Gabard is a Co-Founder of UpRights. Kingsley Abbott is the Director of Global Accountability & International Justice at the International Commission of Jurists. The authors would like to thank Luigi Prosperi, for his assistance and suggestions for this post.] Introduction  On 1 February 2021, the Myanmar’s Army executed a coup d’état, overthrowing the elected civilian government that won the election in...

[Shayna Bauchner is a researcher in the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch.] On August 1, Myanmar’s commander-in-chief, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, dressed in civilian clothes, made a televised speech six months to the day after leading a coup that thrust the country back under brutal military rule. Amid claims of establishing a multiparty democracy, the junta leader announced that his manufactured state of emergency,...

It has now been over six months since the coup by the Myanmar military on 1 February 2021. There are multiple crises at the moment in Myanmar – mass atrocities being committed by the security forces on a daily basis, a devastating Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing armed conflicts in various parts of Myanmar, the continued marginalization of many minorities, and proceedings at international courts related to...

Mohsen al Attar and Rafael Quintero Godinez Investment is a heavy word. It stumbles rather than rolls off the tongue, perhaps because the speaker is aware of its convoluted character. It invokes images of factories, infrastructure, workers, money, and men (in suits or in hard hats, usually both). Most of all, investment conveys an evolutionary trajectory; one that is ideological and...

[Dr. Dalia Palombo  is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen.] Imperialism and Transnational Human Rights Litigation How to hold multinationals to account for human rights abuses? This is a question that has tormented scholars, litigators and advocates. It is difficult to answer because the term “multinational” does not exist in law. From the legal perspective, a multinational is a conglomerate of...

[Gabrielle Holly is a Senior Adviser in the Human Rights and Business Department at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and an experienced commercial disputes practitioner. You can find her on twitter at @Gabriellellell.]  In recent years we have seen tremendous momentum behind moves to introduce mandatory human rights due diligence obligations in law, both at the national level and at the international...

[Penelope A. Bergkamp is a graduate from the National University of Singapore and KU Leuven, and law practitioner in Brussels.] Corporate liability and supply chain liability (SCL) in particular are experiencing a rapid and dramatic revolution. Supply chain liability (“SCL”) is the liability of a multinational corporation for damages caused by its business partners, often in developing countries. The term business partners refers to any business partner,...

[Paul Mougeolle is a representative of the association Notre Affaire à Tous, legal researcher for the NGO Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and Ph.D. candidate at University of Paris Nanterre and University of Potsdam.] A wind of change is currently blowing in climate change litigation. Plaintiffs secure pioneering wins before the highest courts of Colombia, the Netherlands, Ireland, France and Germany. On the 26th of May...