Themes

[Barrie Sander is a Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil and Jason Rudall is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Leiden University.] The entire symposium is accessible in PDF format here. As we write this introduction we are each sitting in different houses, in different countries, on different continents, and in different hemispheres. We could not be much farther apart. And...

Recent weeks have witnessed the rapid global spread of a novel coronavirus known as COVID-19. At the time of posting (23 March 2020) the World Health Organisation has reported 294,110 confirmed cases and 12,944 deaths across 187 countries, areas or territories.  In response to the pandemic, Opinio Juris will host a symposium on COVID-19 and international law, kicking off next week on Monday, 30 March...

[ Luigi Daniele is Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Trent University, where he leads the undergraduate and postgraduate modules in International Humanitarian Law.] For more than a decade international lawyers have been debating Israel’s claim against the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the situation in Palestine, notoriously based on the argument that no Palestine State exists since ‘the Palestinian Authority lacks effective control over the...

[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...

[Triestino Mariniello is Senior Lecturer in Law and Coordinator of the Research Unit in ‘International Justice and Human Rights’ at Edge Hill University, UK. Chantal Meloni is Associate Professor at the University of Milan, Italy where she teaches International Criminal Law and Senior Legal Adviser to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Germany.] This Symposium on ‘The Question of...

[Ulic Egan is a Swansea University Research Excellence Scholar at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK.] The use of open source investigative methodology and user-generated content has the potential to be hugely transformational in the pursuit and democratisation of international criminal justice. The abundance of video information relating to some conflicts is staggering. Event reconstruction and demonstrative digital modelling visual presentation platforms can play an...

[Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK; Daragh Murray is a senior lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law and Human Rights Centre, Deputy Workstream Lead on the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, and Co-I on the Open Source Research for Rights project and Alexa Koenig is...

[Dearbhla Minogue is a Legal Officer for the Global Legal Action Network and Ruwadzano Patience Makumbe is a Zimbabwean lawyer and currently a Hillary Rodham Clinton Global Challenges Programme Scholar at Swansea University.] Digital technologies have empowered citizens to not only be consumers of information but also creators and distributors, making it possible for ordinary people to highlight human rights violations across the world. As has been the case...