Courts & Tribunals

[Dr Letizia Lo Giacco is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University] A default mode to understand and reflect on the activity of the International Criminal Court (ICC, ‘the Court’) is from the standpoint of international criminal law. This comes of course quite natural, being the Court a permanent pivot in the international criminal justice...

[Souheir Edelbi is a Lecturer in the School of Law at Western Sydney University] Palestinian victims have faced double standards and unnecessary procedural hurdles at the ICC, leading to a 'state of exception' where standard legal procedures are either suspended or circumvented. Ardi Imseis has critically examined this phenomenon in relation to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), specifically Prosecutor Bensouda's...

[Dr Iryna Marchuk is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) Dr Aloka Wanigasuriya is an assistant professor at the Department of Law at the University of Southern Denmark (Denmark)] Introduction  The international law community is abuzz with the news of ratification of the Rome Statute (RS) by the Ukrainian parliament on 21 August 2024, which was symbolically...

[I serve as the ICC Prosecutor's Special Adviser on War Crimes. This post is written in my academic capacity and does not reflect the position of the Office of the Prosecutor.] It is being widely reported that President Zelensky has submitted the Rome Statute to Ukraine's parliament for ratification. If so, that is great news: although Ukraine's two Art. 12(3) declarations...

[Eoin Jackson is a PHD Candidate at LSE] At present, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) is considering its Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency and Human Rights. The proceedings follow on the heels of the landmark European Court of Human Rights decision in KlimaSeniorinnen v Switzerland, where the Court issued a declaratory judgment that the human rights of the...

[Sindhura Polepalli is a Maritime Legal Consultant to the Directorate General of Shipping (Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, Government of India)] This post is written in the author's personal capacity. On May 21, 2024 the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) confirmed in its Advisory Opinion (AO) that climate change poses an existential threat (ITLOS AO, para 66)....

[Faraz Shahlaei is an Adjunct Professor of law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles] Introduction The intersection of human rights and sports has reached a crucial point with the Grand Chamber (GC) of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) taking over the Caster Semenya case. The case alleges human rights violations on several grounds due to DSD (Differences of Sexual Development)...

[Emre Acar is a PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies researching "The Role of International Judicial Governance Institutions in Respect of State Resistance to International Courts and Tribunals".] Applications for arrest warrants against Israeli officials in the Situation in Palestine have triggered political attacks from Israel and the United States against the International Criminal Court (ICC)....

Note: although I serve as Special Adviser to the ICC Prosecutor on War Crimes, I was not involved in the Al Hassan case. The Trial Chamber released its 822-page (!) judgment in the Al Hassan case yesterday. Al Hassan was convicted of a number of serious crimes, including the crime against humanity of torture and the war crimes of torture and...

[Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, UK and Principal Investigator of the TRUE project. Stephen Sharp Queener is an associate of the Law program at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, a Masters Student in Public Policy at Stanford University, and a current Fulbright Student Scholar in Germany. Basile Simon is...

Note: I serve as Special Adviser to the ICC Prosecutor on War Crimes. Twitter is awash with commentary about tweets issued by the Registry that explain the difference between arrest warrants and summonses. Many people have speculated that perhaps the tweets are related to the Palestine situation. Any such speculation is unwarranted, as the tweets are part of a long-scheduled series...