In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Courts & Tribunals

01 Jan

[Cale Davis is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He was previously a Prosecutor with the Northern Territory DPP and a Judge’s Associate at the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Australia. His research concerns prosecutorial discretion in international criminal justice.] From the rarefied corridors of The Hague’s international...

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23 Dec

[Marta Bo is a Researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague.] On 14 November 2019, Pre-Trial Chamber III (PTC III) authorized the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes allegedly committed against the Rohingya population (Article 15 Decision). This decision was unsurprising in light of the Jurisdiction Decision delivered by Pre Trial Chamber...

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21 Dec

The International Court of Justice has just last week commenced and concluded provisional measures hearings in a case between The Gambia and Myanmar. It is based on allegations of violations of the Genocide Convention and is the culmination of years of persecution of the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. While there have been waves of atrocities, in...

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12 Dec

On 11 December 2019, Myanmar presented its case before the International Court of Justice, in the matter of provisional measures brought by The Gambia in relation to the Rohingya, under the Genocide Convention. Even though the hearings were for a specific determination – that of provisional measures – the arguments presented by Myanmar are a glimpse of the legal strategy...

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11 Dec

Yesterday The Gambia commenced its arguments in the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, relating to the application of the Genocide Convention and the Rohingya. After filing its application on 11 November, in which The Gambia initiated the case at the ICJ and also asked the court to order interim measures of protection, the hearings over three days are for a specific purpose – to...

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09 Dec

[Natasha Arnpriester an attorney with the Open Society Justice Initiative, where she focuses on criminal justice reform, anti-torture and citizenship. You can find her on Twitter: @NatashaArnpr] On 8 November 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and highest court for disputes between states, ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear Ukraine’s case against Russia for violations under...

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07 Dec

On Friday, the Assembly of States Parties unanimously adopted a Swiss proposal to extend the war crime of starvation to non-international armed conflict (NIAC). Previously, for reasons that seem to be largely accidental, the war crime only applied in international armed conflict (IAC). The new war crime is, of course, a welcome development. There is no justification for ever using starvation...

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04 Dec

As readers are no doubt aware, the OTP has once again declined -- now for a third time -- to open an investigation into Israel's violent attack on the MV Mavi Marmara. That decision was wholly expected; the only question was how the OTP would deal with the Appeals Chamber's recent decision in the Comoros situation, in which the Chamber...

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26 Nov

I have posted the first draft on SSRN. The article is entitled, intending to be provocative, "Genuine" Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention -- Another Ticking Time-Bomb Scenario. Here is the abstract: The activation of the crime of aggression at the ICC has renewed interest in one of the oldest and most fraught questions of the jus ad bellum: whether a state is entitled...

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25 Nov

[Mattia Pinto is a PhD Candidate and teaching assistant in the Law Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His PhD research analyses the role that human rights play in fostering and legitimising penal expansion. Diletta Marchesi is a PhD Fellow for fundamental research of the Research Foundation – Flanders at the KU Leuven Institute of...

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