In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Courts & Tribunals

18 Oct

The Philippine Supreme Court has just completed hearings in a legal challenge relating to the Philippine withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. On the heels of the South African High Court ruling against the withdrawal from the ICC on the grounds of unconstitutionality and thereby invalidatingthe withdrawal, this case in the Philippines bears watching. I attended the three days of hearings...

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16 Oct

[Victor Kattan is Senior Research Fellow of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore where he heads the Transsystemic Law Cluster. He is also an Associate Fellow of NUS Law and an associate (non-resident) member of Temple Garden Chambers in London.] Palestine’s Application Instituting Proceedings against the United States of America (U.S.) at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 28 September has produced much commentary in a short...

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15 Oct

[Matt Pollard is the Director of Center for Independence of Judges and Lawyers International Commission of Jurists.] "I was very emotional," writes Brett Kavanaugh. "I said a few things I should not have said." It is extraordinary that someone poised to be appointed to the highest court of a country should have felt it necessary to reaffirm his judicial qualities, and seek to...

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09 Oct

[Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School and Faculty Affiliate at the Handa Center for Human Rights & International Justice at Stanford University. Prior to returning to academia, she served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State.] Until very recently, the Trump...

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04 Oct

[Shaheed Fatima, Q.C., is is a London-based barrister, practicing from Blackstone Chambers.] In ‘The Trump Administration and International Law’ Professor Harold Hongju Koh diagnoses the multiple threats to domestic and international institutions and norms posed by the current administration’s foreign policy approach; prescribes a ‘political counterstrategy’ based on transnational legal process which may be applied by a range of players, with the...

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19 Sep

The International Commission of Jurists organised a fascinating side-event yesterday at the Human Rights Council. Here is the ICJ's background statement: Particularly when crimes under international law are perpetrated on a large scale in situations of crisis, there is an urgent need to preserve evidence for use in eventual criminal proceedings, whether at the International Criminal Court or other national or...

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10 Sep

Much has been made of how relations between the ICC have improved since the second term of Bush the Younger. I think we all expected that to change in the wake of Trump's election, particularly after the OTP announced its intention to investigate detention-related abuses in Afghanistan and in CIA black sites in Eastern Europe For a while, nothing much...

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06 Sep

Okay, it didn't directly say that. But that is the logical consequence of the Pre-Trial Chamber's new decision upholding the Court's jurisdiction over the deportation of the Rohingya from Myanmar. According to the PTC (para. 71), the crime against humanity of deportation (unlike forcible transfer) necessarily takes place in two states, because one of the essential elements of the crime...

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04 Jul

On Monday, the OTP filed a motion in the Bemba Witness Tampering Case entitled "Detailed Notice of Additional Sentencing Submissions." The OTP argues that, in determining the appropriate sentence for Bemba, Kilolo, and Mangenda, Trial Chamber VII should take into account the fact that the witness tampering by Bemba and his co-defendants led the Appeals Chamber to wrongly acquit Bemba in the...

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28 Jun

This is a major development, one that I hope does not get lost in the welter of commentary on the Bemba acquittal. If you recall, in June 2012 the Libyan government detained four ICC officials who were in Zintan on official Court business: Melinda Taylor from the Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD), who had been provisionally appointed...

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