On 17 May 2017, Judge Marc Perrin de Brichambaut gave a talk at Peking Law School about the role of victims at the ICC. The talk, which was recorded and then transcribed, included a number of shocking comments, such as describing "the Africans" as "a group of 54 countries who provide the suspects and the accused" to the Court. Judge...
[Aurel Sari is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter and the Director of the Exeter Centre for International Law. This post was written in a personal capacity. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] The notion that military personnel are entitled to use force in their own defence is widely accepted. However, beyond...
[Adil Ahmad Haque is Professor of Law and Judge Jon O. Newman Scholar at Rutgers Law School. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] Suppose that a soldier from State A intentionally kills a civilian in State B. Maybe State A is fighting an international armed conflict against State B. Maybe State A is fighting a non-international armed...
Erica Gaston is an international lawyer with the Global Public Policy institute (GPPi) and a non-resident fellow at the New America Foundation. She has been working in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict or post-conflict zones on the application of laws of war, human rights and other related issues since 2006. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense...
[Bruce ‘Ossie’ Oswald is Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law.This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] What follows is an outline of how the use of force in self-defence as a doctrine has evolved in UN peacekeeping operations. I focus on how the use of force...
[Colonel (retired) Randall Bagwell served 30 years as a legal advisor for the US Army, deploying on numerous operations. He is now the Director of International Humanitarian Law for the American Red Cross. Any views expressed in this paper are his personally, and should in no way be attributed to the US Army or the American Red Cross. This post...
[Camilla G. Cooper (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Operational Law at the Norwegian Defence University College. Sigrid Redse Johansen is a Judge Advocate General of the Norwegian Armed Forces. Please note that the following was written in the authors' personal capacity and is not to be considered as an official Norwegian reply to the questions posed. This post is...
[Hans Boddens Hosang is Deputy Director of Legal Affairs of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and Senior External Researcher at the Law of Armed Conflict and Military Operations (LACMO) Research Group, Amsterdam Center for International Law at the University of Amsterdam. Terry Gill is Professor of Military Law at the University of Amsterdam & the Netherlands Defence Academy and is...
I thought I was done blogging about the Pre-Trial Chamber's authorization decision, but there is another aspect of it that keeps nagging at me: the limits PTC II would have imposed on the OTP's investigation if it had authorized it. Here are the key paragraphs (emphasis mine): 40. More specifically, the precise width and breadth of the Prosecutor's power to investigate...
[Carlos Lopez is a Senior Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists.] Claire Bright has nicely concluded the series of blogs in this online symposium on the legal and policy implications of the UK Supreme Court judgment on jurisdiction in Vedanta v Lungowe. It is time now to close the symposium and gratefully acknowledge the participants (Robert McCorquodale, Doug Cassel, Anil Yilmaz, Gabrielle Holly, Lucas Roorda and Claire Bright) and our...
[Claire Bright is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and a Research Fellow in Business and Human Rights at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.] In the Vedanta case, the claimants relied on Article 4.1 (combined with Article 63) of the Brussels I Recast Regulation to establish the jurisdiction of the English courts over the parent company since Vedanta...
[Gabrielle Holly is a business and human rights specialist and an experienced commercial disputes practitioner with Omnia Strategy LLP, who acted for the International Commission of Jurists and the CORE Coalition in this case. You can find her on twitter at @Gabriellellell.] With the rise in power of multinational groups and the intricacies of global supply chains, the question of where a company should...