On June 25, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe (CoE) and the President of Ukraine signed an agreement to create a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine (STCoA). The tribunal, which will be based on Ukraine's territorial jurisdiction but will have a number of international elements -- and is thus properly categorised as a hybrid...
[Megan Hirst is ICC victims' representative in the Bangladesh/Myanmar and Afghanistan situations. Marie O'Leary is acting Principal Counsel for the ICC Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD). The views in this post are those of the author alone and do not reflect the views of the ICC. Valeria Babără is Legal Adviser at Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice. Danya Chaikel...
[Megan Hirst is ICC victims' representative in the Bangladesh/Myanmar and Afghanistan situations. Marie O'Leary is acting Principal Counsel for the ICC Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD). The views in this post are those of the author alone and do not reflect the views of the ICC. Valeria Babără is Legal Adviser at Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice. Danya Chaikel is the...
[Dr Veronica Botticelli is a Postdoctoral Researcher in International Law at the University of Milan, Italy. She obtained a PhD from University of Padua.] On 5 May 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, ‘the Court’) issued an order rejecting Sudan’s request for provisional measures in the case concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the...
[Lisa Reinsberg is the founding executive director of the International Justice Resource Center, a PhD candidate with the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University, and a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law] Human rights oversight bodies have rejected an unknown number of complaints because individual complainants used language that was insulting or offensive to...
Introduction On 27 November 2024, Israel appealed two decisions of the Pre-Trial Chamber that were issued simultaneously with the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. The first decision rejected Israel's claim that it was entitled to a new Art. 18 notification because the OTP's s investigation after October 7 was substantially different than the investigation the OTP opened...
[Terje Einarsen is Professor of International Law at the University of Bergen and Chairperson of the Norwegian Section of International Commission of Jurists] Part I of this post discussed why the jurisdiction should be extended and the current proposal to amend Article 15bis. An Alternative Proposal: Amending Article 5 Against this background (see Part I), it would presumably be better and more effective...
[Terje Einarsen is Professor of International Law at the University of Bergen and Chairperson of the Norwegian Section of International Commission of Jurists] The Assembly of State Parties special session on the review of the amendments on the crime of aggression will be held at the United Nations, New York, 7 to 9 July 2025. It comes with a challenging geopolitical...
[Safia K Southey is a student at Columbia Law School, with experience at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Justice and Accountability, and the International Center for Transitional Justice. She focuses on international law, Middle East policy, and alternative justice mechanisms.] On March 11, 2025, something unusual happened—the International Criminal Court (ICC) secured the arrest of a former head...
[Anuja Jaiswal is a human rights consultant who has worked in various contexts, including Gambia, Ukraine, MENA, Myanmar, and North Korea. She studied at the University of Oxford and Columbia University, and has an LL.M in Transnational Crime and Justice.] Generally, there is an absence of adequate gender representation on the international bench. This gap has been identified by academics and...
On April 4, a group of five states -- Costa Rica, Germany, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Vanuatu -- formally submitted to the UN Secretary-General the text of a proposed amendment to the Rome Statute. The amendment seeks to harmonise the ICC's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression with the jurisdictional regime that applies to the other crimes. It would do...
[Javier Urizar is a Guatemalan human rights lawyer, currently working at the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)] A Spanish version of this post has been published on Agenda Estado de Derecho here. National courts have always had an inseparable relationship with human rights. As the controlbody by excellence, they have been fundamental in limiting the acts of authority and sanctioning those...