International Criminal Law

[Deepak Raju is a Senior Managing Associate at Sidley Austin LLP, Geneva, focusing on international disputes; he is also a visiting faculty at National University of Juridical Sciences (India), and a doctoral candidate at the University of Geneva.] In a recent post on EJIL: Talk, I discussed Ukraine’s new dispute before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) against Russia, and compared...

[Katharine Fortin is an Associate Professor at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht University. She is the founder and co-editor of the Armed Groups and International Law blog.]  The author is grateful to comments from Brianne McGonigle Leyh and Vivek Bhatt on an earlier draft of this post. Reading Boyd van Dijk’s Preparing for War at a time when the prospect of...

[Dr Ka Lok Yip is an Assistant Professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University.] Events vs Tendencies: an Interdisciplinary Divide? In view of the gravity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is understandable that most legal commentators focus on the legal norms regulating the event directly, jus contra bellum, rather than other legal norms regulating the tendencies that make up the more...

A little-known aspect of the war in Ukraine is that both Russia and Ukraine have deployed weapons that are capable of being used fully autonomously: for Russia, Lancet drones; for Ukraine, Punisher drones. Both weapons are capable of being operated semi-autonomously, and it is not clear whether Russia or Ukraine has used them in their fully autonomous mode. But the...

[Douglas Irvin-Erickson is Assistant Professor at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University, where he directs the Raphaël Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program.] Dictator, assassin, war criminal. Russian President Vladimir Putin may soon add genocidaire to his resume.  A long line of blood runs from Chechnya, through Syria and Georgia, to Ukraine. Since 2014, in Ukraine, Russian forces have committed war crimes...

Call for Papers Call for Papers - ASCOMARE Yearbook on the Law of the Sea (Volume 2): Associazione di Consulenza in Diritto del Mare (ASCOMARE) is pleased to announce a call for papers for Volume 2 ("Fisheries and the Law of the Sea in the Anthropocene Era") of the ASCOMARE Yearbook on the Law of the Sea (YLoS). Building on the...

[Dr. Smadar Ben-Natan is an Israeli and international lawyer, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studies the intersection of international law, human rights, and criminal justice in Israel/Palestine, and has published on Israeli military courts, POW status, torture, and extraterritorial human rights.] [A previous version of this commentary was published in Hebrew by the Forum for Regional Thinking,...

[Dr. Smadar Ben-Natan is an Israeli and international lawyer, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studies the intersection of international law, human rights, and criminal justice in Israel/Palestine, and has published on Israeli military courts, POW status, torture, and extraterritorial human rights.] [A previous version of this commentary was published in Hebrew by the Forum...

Introduction  The 1988 political prisoner massacre (the massacre, the 1988 massacre) in Iran occurred almost 35 years ago. Yet its relevance remains visible in contemporary debates on Iran’s human rights record, the legitimacy of the government, and the human rights credentials of its leaders. Most importantly, it remains an unresolved issue worthy of investigative and judicial attention for the victims, survivors,...

Call for Papers Call for Papers - Tribuna Internacional: Tribuna Internacional is the official journal of the International Law Department at the University of Chile. We invite submissions (in English or Spanish) of unpublished papers in the field of International Public Law, International Private Law, International Human Rights Law, and International Relations. For more information about the CfP, go here. For questions,...

[Kim Christian Priemel is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oslo and author of The Betrayal. The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence (OUP 2016).] The Kremlin’s allegation that its invasion of Ukraine was necessary to stop a genocide committed by the Kiev government against the population of the secessionist Donetsk and Luhansk provinces has been widely and rightly...