In association with the International Commission of Jurists

History of International Law

04 Mar

Growing up in Lima, I heard the mythologized story of Columbus “discovering” America (the continent, sorry US) a million times: In a leap of faith, Queen Isabel of Spain sold her Crown jewels to finance a daring explorer’s expedition to unknown lands. Nobody believed in him, but Columbus persevered, proving everyone wrong and discovering a land no one else knew about, on three little caravels,...

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13 Dec

[John D. Haskell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester Law School and Junior Faculty at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy.] “I [find] myself in a spiral of uneasiness … [S]omething in the authors’ tone of voice, in their self-positioning [is] disturbing… I am troubled by the initial pairing of the notions of democratic...

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07 Oct

[Tania Atilano holds a Juris Doctor from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is conducting research on the laws of war in nineteenth-century Mexico and on counter-guerrilla warfare in the state of Guerrero (Mexico) during the '70s.] Since I published the article about the criminalization of the Laws of War in the 1871 Mexican Criminal Code (MCC), I have received various...

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30 Sep

1- White Supremacy and the International Legal Order Writing in 1997, Charles Mills threw a grenade into political theory. With a touch of hyperbole, we might even say he collapsed the contours of the social sciences. Standard undergraduate philosophy courses, he tells us, cover two thousand years of political thought. Mainstream philosophers introduce students to liberalism and libertarianism, capitalism and communitarianism, socialism...

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01 Aug

Researching legal history can frequently lead to the reframing of old debates, the discovery of new ways of reading a past text, and even the foregrounding of erased or invisibilised histories. It is a very rewarding kind of research. Other times, however, it simply leads to curious stories. These stories are probably not well-suited for a journal article, but –...

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07 Jun

[Ayan Garg is a student of law at the National Law University, Delhi. He is interested in international law generally, human rights law, and refugee law.] “It is incumbent upon all of us, the still living, to resist and combat oblivion, so commonplace in our post-modern, ephemeral times… Remembrance is a manifestation of gratitude, and gratitude is perhaps the noblest manifestation of rendering...

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06 Jun

[Lily Zanjani is an Advanced LL.M Student of Public international Law at Leiden University. She is currently a legal intern at International Criminal Court and International Centre for Counterterrorism.] This article will scrutinize the United Kingdom’s legal justifications concerning the use of force in Iraq in accordance with its interpretation of United Nations’ (UN) Resolution 1441. This resolution revolves around Iraq’s non-compliance with...

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06 May

[Dr Plesch is Professor of Diplomacy and Strategy at SOAS University of London and a member (door tenant) of the chambers of Stephen Kay QC at 9 Bedford Row. He is the author of Human Rights After Hitler.] The Russian aggression against Ukraine has created fresh interest in international criminal justice. Vital support for this next phase in the application and development of international criminal law is...

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06 May

[Dr Amina Adanan is an Assistant Professor in Law at Maynooth University, National University of Ireland.] The UNWCC is the name of the formal multilateral organisation that facilitated a network of tribunals in which war criminals were tried for international crimes committed during WWII. It was a UN agency that operated from 1943-48 to support localised prosecutions of international crimes by the war Victors and...

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05 May

[Michael Fleming is a Professor at the Polish University Abroad, London.] During the Second World War, the Polish Government in Exile, based in London from the summer of 1940, pursued a twin-track policy to ensure German crimes taking place in occupied Poland were brought to the attention of the international community and that those responsible would face justice. In the first instance, the Polish Government highlighted German...

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05 May

[Megan Donaldson is a Lecturer in Public International Law at University College London.] [This post draws on a draft entry for the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (Donaldson 2022), available on request.] Although Ethiopia had been deliberately excluded from membership of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Ethiopia sought to submit cases against figures responsible for atrocities during the Italian invasion and occupation (1935–41). The...

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