In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

05 Jul

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia. Part I can be found here.] A Collective Right to Existence Westphalian international law is not the best platform to address ‘dealing with the past’ issues (Koskenniemi). The Treaty of Westphalia itself contained a legal oblivion clause (Common Article II)...

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05 Jul

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia.] Genocide Disparities and Grotian Moments International law has been credited for normalizing, theorizing, and proliferating several systemic injustices, being the ‘culprit and the remedy’(Stahn) of/for an imperialistic order premised on centers and peripheries (Anghie). Although, such statements offer a recapitulation of the use and...

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01 Jul

[Arvind Ganesan is business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch.] The United Nations formally recognized a decade ago that businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights. It was a groundbreaking development. 10 years later, it’s clear that it was only a first step: we need laws that enforce companies’ duty to protect workers and communities from abuse and hold them accountable if they...

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30 Jun

Young Park is a JD Candidate and International Law and Human Rights Fellow at New York University School of Law. Currently she is an intern at the International Commission of Jurists, Africa Regional Programme.Onen Cylus is an LLB finalist at Makerere University. He is also currently working as an intern with the International Commission of Jurists, with a passion for...

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28 Jun

[Doug Cassel is Emeritus Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School.] The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this month in Nestle USA Inc. v. Doe that “general corporate activity” in the U.S. is not a sufficient domestic basis to warrant Alien Tort Statute (ATS) jurisdiction over claims against a U.S. corporation for alleged human rights violations overseas. The media response generally echoed that of the...

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28 Jun

In my previous posts on the crime of ecocide -- Post 1, Post 2 -- I argued the theoretical/normative case against the IEP's decision to subject lawful acts to anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis via the "wantonness" requirement. In this post, I want to bracket the issue of whether the definition of ecocide should distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts and question...

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25 Jun

[Dr. Dalia Palombo  is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen.] Imperialism and Transnational Human Rights Litigation How to hold multinationals to account for human rights abuses? This is a question that has tormented scholars, litigators and advocates. It is difficult to answer because the term “multinational” does not exist in law. From the legal perspective, a multinational is a conglomerate of...

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24 Jun

[Gabrielle Holly is a Senior Adviser in the Human Rights and Business Department at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and an experienced commercial disputes practitioner. You can find her on twitter at @Gabriellellell.]  In recent years we have seen tremendous momentum behind moves to introduce mandatory human rights due diligence obligations in law, both at the national level and at the international...

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24 Jun

[Zachary D. Kaufman is Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Houston Law Center. His full biography is available here.] On June 15 and 16, the Belgian Parliament held a hearing about the Islamic State’s genocide against the Yezidis in Iraq and Syria. I testified, as did, among others, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad, a survivor of the genocide....

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24 Jun

[Dr. Mishana Hosseinioun is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford and a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the LSE. She is the president of the international justice consultancy MH Group, which submitted to the ICC an Article 15 Communication integral in opening the formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.] This May, the ongoing conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territory...

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24 Jun

[Penelope A. Bergkamp is a graduate from the National University of Singapore and KU Leuven, and law practitioner in Brussels.] Corporate liability and supply chain liability (SCL) in particular are experiencing a rapid and dramatic revolution. Supply chain liability (“SCL”) is the liability of a multinational corporation for damages caused by its business partners, often in developing countries. The term business partners refers to any business partner,...

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24 Jun

[Ori Pomson is a member of the Israel Bar and currently an LLM candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Previously, he served for six years as an officer (rank of captain) in the Israel Defence Forces Military Advocate General’s Corps International Law Department, where he served as Assistant Legal Adviser for Cyber Affairs and Assistant Head of the Legal Development Section.] I. Introduction One of the...

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