In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Criminal Law

16 Oct

[Zachary Marcone is a U.S. lawyer and degree candidate at Stanford Law School.] On 9 October 2026, the United States sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an institution. Although the United States previously sanctioned individual ICC prosecutors and judges, this is the first time it has specifically targeted the institution itself. The U.S. sanctions are an existential threat to the...

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25 Sep

[Jens Iverson is an assistant professor of international law at Leiden University.] In November 2025, I wrote on this site about The Power and Responsibility of the EU to Protect the ICC from US Sanctions. There I discussed issues such as the use of the Anti-Coercion Instrument, (AKA “the Big Bazooka”), the Extraterritoriality (Blocking) Statute and the European Commission supported Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium...

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21 Sep

[Godfrey Odongo is a nonresident senior fellow with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council.] Introduction Africa has witnessed several intractable armed conflicts, political crises and upheavals. including examples over the last four decades such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide and previous armed conflicts dating back to the 1990s. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimated in 2025 that Africa...

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19 Sep

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran (IIFFM), created by the Human Rights Council, has released a new report. It's a depressing read, painstakingly cataloging Iran's human-rights violations and analysing two airstrikes carried out by the United States on 28 February 2026 -- the notorious attack on the the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, which...

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18 Sep

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law and Managing Editor of Opinio Juris.]The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran (FFMI) released its 18-page report to the Human Rights Council on 17 September 2026. In the report, among other findings, the Mission outlines reasonable grounds to believe that the United...

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17 Sep

[Veronika Vozniuk is a Ukrainian legal and policy professional working on issues related to international humanitarian law, human rights, and the legal consequences of armed conflict.] Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has made significant efforts to investigate and prosecute individuals responsible for war crimes committed on its territory. The scale of the alleged crimes is immense and continues...

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06 Sep

Like most academics these days, I am very concerned about students misusing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and ClaudeAI when they write papers for me. I don't teach very often in my current position, but I do supervise masters theses. And there have been a number over the past few years that I suspected were written, in whole or...

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04 Sep

[Ezequiel Jimenez Martinez is an Adjunct Professor at the Pompeu Fabra Law Faculty, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Law Research and Policy. He is the author of Governing the International Criminal Court: the History and Practice of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute (Brill, 2025). Sergey Vasiliev is a Professor of International Law at...

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04 Sep

[Ezequiel Jimenez Martinez is an Adjunct Professor at the Pompeu Fabra Law Faculty, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Law Research and Policy. He is the author of Governing the International Criminal Court: the History and Practice of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute (Brill, 2025). Sergey Vasiliev is a Professor of International Law at...

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28 Aug

[Rashmi Raman is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law, National University of Singapore.] In January this year, on this blog, Christine Ryan, Richard Dicker and Akshaya Kumar urged supportive States to resist what they called premature minimalism, warning that limiting proposals to what nearly all member States might accept “risks pointless concessions and irreparably weakening the text”. The...

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21 Aug

[Natia Navrouzov is a lawyer and the Executive Director of Yazda, a global Yazidi organisation that has documented ISIL’s crimes since 2014 and supports survivors of the Yazidi genocide through legal, psychosocial, and advocacy work] On 20 March 2026, the Paris Assize Court convicted Sabri Essid of genocide and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed against the Yazidi community in Iraq....

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