The Court of the Citizens of the World’ - a peoples tribunal - was organized by the Cinema for Peace Foundation, relating to the crime of aggression in Ukraine. The tribunal considered charges brought against Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression presented by a Prosecution team, and heard witness testimony from 20 - 23 February 2023 in public hearings...
[Stephen Rapp is a former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice and former international prosecutor at Rwanda and Sierra Leone tribunals.] The Court of the Citizens of the World’ - a peoples tribunal - was organized by the Cinema for Peace Foundation, relating to the crime of aggression in Ukraine. The tribunal considered charges brought against Vladimir Putin for the crime...
A few days ago, the European Law Institute published its final report on ecocide. The report not only provides a definition of ecocide, it also contains Model Rules for an EU Directive and a Council Decision that ELI hopes will both "contribute to the inter-institutional negotiations in the EU on the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and...
[Máiréad Enright is Professor of Feminist Legal Studies at Birmingham Law School.] On October 31 2022, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) published its decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland. Mrs. Coppin is 73 years old and spent her early life in State-funded, religious-run carceral institutions. She was born in a county home to a teenage single mother. Aged two, she...
Jennifer Trahan has a new post at Just Security entitled "Why a 'Hybrid' Ukrainian Tribunal on the Crime of Aggression Is Not the Answer." There are many problems with Trahan's post, but in this response I want to focus specifically on the most glaring one: namely, her claim that a hybrid tribunal would need to apply Ukraine's domestic crime of...
Support has been growing in recent weeks for creating a hybrid tribunal to address Russia's criminal act of aggression against Ukraine instead of an ad hoc Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression (STCoA). The German Minister of Foreign Affairs has endorsed a hybrid tribunal over an STCoA, as has the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary. Even the US War Crimes...
1 February marks the second anniversary of the coup d’état in Myanmar. In the past year, the situation for the population has only become more fraught and difficult. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 2,890 individuals have been killed, likely an underestimation, 16,000 have been detained on spurious charges, scores have been tortured, many have been sentenced to death,...
[Maria Elena Vignoli is a senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch.] The events of 2022 brought renewed attention and support for accountability for serious international crimes. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought images of mass burial sites and bombed-out cities back on the front pages, and the far-reaching impact of the conflict triggered a strong response from the international...
[Dr Jonathan Kolieb is Senior Lecturer and Peace and Conflict Theme Lead, Business and Human Rights Centre, at RMIT University in Australia. Ann Letch is a PhD Candidate at RMIT University, Australia.] Another chapter in the pursuit of accountability for business people for committing heinous human rights abuses is (finally) unfolding in The Hague, Netherlands over the coming weeks. After 26...
Astrid Coracini and Jennifer Trahan have a new post at Just Security that argues a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression created either by treaty or by a General Assembly-endorsed agreement between Ukraine and the UN would not have to recognise the personal immunity of Russian officials. I disagree, for reasons I have explained in a recent article in...
On Tuesday, the Office of the President of Ukraine issued a press release concerning plans for creating a Special Tribunal for Russian Aggression. Most of the information in the press release was boilerplate, reaffirming the need for such a tribunal and expressing hope that the international community will get behind one. One comment, however, set off my lawdar: As noted at...
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was created by the Cambodian government in partnership with the United Nations. Its purpose was to prosecute crimes under international and Cambodian law committed between 1975 and 1979, when Cambodia was ruled by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), better known as the ‘Khmer Rouge’. On 22 September 2022, the ECCC’s...