International Criminal Law

[Waleed Mahmoud Elfarrs, PhD Candidate in international law at Ghent University, is a legal expert consulting on armed conflict in the context of the MENA region.] [Mona Ghyoot is a Master in Laws student at Ghent University, specializing in public international law and writing a master’s thesis on universal jurisdiction.] 1.     Introduction On 12 May 2023, the French Court of Cassation delivered two landmark decisions on the...

[Emilia Truluck is a Legal Fellow at REDRESS, focusing on justice and accountability mechanisms in North Africa.] Earlier this month the victims’ legal representative presented her opening statements in the ground-breaking trial at the International Criminal Court against former Janjaweed commander Ali Muhammad Ali Abd Al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb.   Ali Kushayb is charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes in West Darfur. He is alleged...

[Kurt Mundorff is author of A Cultural Interpretation of the Genocide Convention and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Tennessee Knoxville Department of Political Science.] As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moved westward, so too did Russian officials who began removing Ukrainian children and transferring them to Russia, often parading the children on television as proof of their...

[The Sex Worker Inclusive Feminist Alliance (SWIFA) was formed as part of a long-term strategy of building alliances across the sex workers’ rights and women’s rights movements to advance the acceptance of sex workers’ rights within the women’s movement and the core group of organisations in the alliance include: Amnesty International - International Secretariat, CREA, FEMNET, Global Alliance Against Traffic...

[Matthew Gillett is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Essex Law School and a United Nations Special Mandate holder (Vice-Chair of Working Group on Arbitrary Detention), who previously prosecuted cases before the international courts. The views herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of any other person or organization. The author was...

[Matthew Gillett is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Essex Law School and a United Nations Special Mandate holder (Vice-Chair of Working Group on Arbitrary Detention), who previously prosecuted cases before the international courts. The views herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of any other person or organization. The author was...

[Alison Smith is the International Justice Director for No Peace Without Justice. She has worked and published on the rights of the child in accountability processes for twenty years, and participated in the consultations leading to the adoption of the OTP Children’s Policy.] It has been 20 years since the launch of “International Criminal Justice and Children” by UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre and No Peace Without Justice....

[Andrew Clapham is Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the author of "Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction and War".] The arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova have generated a lot of talk about the absence of any obligation on Russia to comply due to Russia...

Jennifer Trahan is back with another post at Just Security that tries to argue a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression (STCoA) is superior to the internationalized (hybrid) tribunal favoured by (at least) the the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and most recently the US. It will take a couple of responses to cover all of the ways in which...

[Melissa Hendrickse (Twitter: @melhendrickse) is a legal adviser at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, focusing on the intersection between racial and international justice. She has a background in critical race theory, third world approaches to international law and international human rights law. She is based in South Africa.] This April, UN member state delegates gathered in New York to start...