International Criminal Law

[Mohsen al Attar is Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as well as a Contributing Editor to Opinio Juris] Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza—a fifth since its false disengagement in 2006—has once again exposed the catastrophic failures of international law in protecting the world’s most vulnerable from militarism and settler-colonialism. While purportedly targeting resistance, a dubious goal...

[Dr Letizia Lo Giacco is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University] A default mode to understand and reflect on the activity of the International Criminal Court (ICC, ‘the Court’) is from the standpoint of international criminal law. This comes of course quite natural, being the Court a permanent pivot in the international criminal justice...

[Thomas Skouteris is Associate Professor and Chair of the Law Department at The American University in Cairo. He is also Director of the Access to Knowledge Foundation and Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School.] International law finds itself yet again in a profound crisis—perhaps even a breaking point. The ongoing wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa, and across numerous other locations do not...

[Giovanna M. Frisso is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Lincoln] The colonial aspects of international criminal law have been extensively debated in scholarly literature (see here, here, here and here). Socio-economic and cultural rights, along with discriminatory practices, have either been excluded or only partially addressed within the international criminal law framework. Additionally, international structures tied to resource extraction...

[Rocío Lorca is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the University of Chile Law School] The papers in the recent ‘After Critique’ symposium move between critique and possibility regarding the role of international criminal law as an instrument of justice. Natalie Hodgson, for example, gives us good reasons to value international criminal law. Not as a grandiose mechanism that will deliver on the promise of...

[Sophie Rigney is a Senior Lecturer in Law at RMIT University and author of Fairness and Rights in International Criminal Procedure] In the northern summer of 2020, up to 26 million people took to the streets in the United States to protest the murder of George Floyd by city police, and police violence and carceralism generally. These were the largest protests in U.S. history. Others...

Sarah Zarmsky is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre with a focus on international law and new and emerging technologies. In 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. As an understatement, online harms have been rampant in the contexts of the ongoing conflicts in...

[Dr Natalie Hodgson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Law at the University of Nottingham.] On 5 March 2024, news emerged that Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, had been named in an Article 15 communication to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging that he was ‘an accessory to genocide in Gaza’. The communication, prepared by Australian law firm Birchgrove Legal, argued that ‘members of the...

[Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is Professor of International Law and Governance at the University of Edinburg and Adjunct Professor at IE Law School. Barrie Sander (@Barrie_Sander) is Assistant Professor of International Justice at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs.] As contemporary international criminal law (ICL) enters its fourth decade, carceral internationalism has become normalised within the international community to a degree few thought imaginable. Such...

[Tine Destrooper is an associate professor of Human Rights and Transitional Justice at Ghent University’s Human Rights Centre, and the PI of the ERC-funded project Justice Visions (ERC-StG-VictPart-804151) and of the Special Research Fund-project Futureproofing Human Rights: Towards Thicker Forms of Accountability (iBOF/21/031).] A lot has been written about victims’ roles in transitional justice processes. In fact, scholarship focusing on victim...

[Dr Aloka Wanigasuriya is an assistant professor at the Department of Law, University of Southern Denmark] The world’s attention has turned to Mongolia following the news of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to the country. This is the first instance Putin has visited an International Criminal Court (ICC) member state after the ICC arrest warrant against him was issued linked...

[Souheir Edelbi is a Lecturer in the School of Law at Western Sydney University] Palestinian victims have faced double standards and unnecessary procedural hurdles at the ICC, leading to a 'state of exception' where standard legal procedures are either suspended or circumvented. Ardi Imseis has critically examined this phenomenon in relation to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), specifically Prosecutor Bensouda's...