Although the government of Colombia was far from pleased when the ICJ issued a judgment last November in a long-running territorial dispute with Nicaragua, it did not go so far as to say it would simply ignore the ruling. But Colombia's vice president Angelino Garzon seems to be hinting in recent comments that Colombia is prepared to do just that. “The...
I am not sure if it is a trend, but recently several nations have raised dubious legal claims over territory that was ceded away by treaty. For instance, Spain has zero legal claim to Gibraltar, as far as I can tell, unless the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht ceding it to Britain "in perpetuity" can be wished away. Bolivia has zero...
[Dr. HJ van der Merwe is a Lecturer in Public Law Studies at the Law Faculty of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa] The degree to which states are able and willing to dynamically reflect international criminal norms within their domestic legal systems is crucial to the success of the project of international criminal justice. This is exemplified by...
[Sven Pfeiffer is an Associate Expert at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The views expressed in this post are those of the author, writing in his personal capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.] National authorities are increasingly involved in the fight against impunity for perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against...
The Faroe Islands has announced it has filed a referred the European Union to arbitration under the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea. Apparently, it is a dispute over herring. “The Faroe Islands have today referred the use of threats of coercive economic measures by the European Union, in relation to the Atlanto-Scandian herring, to an arbitral tribunal under...
[Laura Salvadego is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Law, University of Ferrara. This work has been developed during a research stay at the New York University School of Law - Center for Research in Crime and Justice, funded by Unicredit bank and by 5 per thousand contributions given to the University of Ferrara in 2010] The need to ensure...
[Tamsin Paige is an M.Phil (Law) Candidate at the Australian National University College of Law] Piracy originating from the coast of Somalia hit its peak in 2011, with 236 attacks occurring in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and the Somali region of the Indian Ocean in that year, according to the IMB’s 2012 piracy report. So far in 2013 the IMB...
[Bharat Malkani is a lecturer at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, where he also runs the Birmingham Law School Pro Bono Group. You can also follow him on Twitter @bharatmalkani] Recently, Ali Babitu Kololo was sentenced to death by a Kenyan court for his role in the murder of David Tebbutt, and the kidnapping of David’s wife, Judith, in September 2011....
[Žygimantas Juška is a member of the defense team of Radovan Karadžić] One of the most high-profile cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić—provides an opportunity to propose changes for the standby counsel model. Nevertheless, the ICTY has struggled to balance the effectiveness of standby counsel and its huge financial burden on the Tribunal. The ICTY previously...
[Marta Bo is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Genova, Italy and a member of the Peace and Justice Initiative. She wrote this post while she was a Visiting Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law] Over the past few years, several proposals have been made to put an end to the culture of impunity persisting among Somali...
[Robert Charles Clarke is a Research Associate at the Supreme Court of Western Australia] It could as well be said that Darré, for example, is guilty of murder of numerous people in the occupied portion of Russia, because, as Minister of Food, he had charge of the Food Estate and supplied the food that maintained the Einsatzgruppen in that territory; that it was...
[Dr. Gilad Noam teaches international criminal law at the Hebrew University and is also a practicing attorney at Israel's Ministry of Justice] What is the underlying nature of a dispute between a State and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on issues of complementarity? Are the proceedings in which a State challenges the admissibility of a situation or a...
