Following on the heels of the much-reported e-mail scandal, FICHL has released a policy brief entitled "A Prosecutor Falls, Time for the Court to Rise" that is an utterly damning indictment of Luis Moreno-Ocampo's tenure at the ICC. Here is a taste of the report, which picks up not long after the Court became operative: This idyllic mood in the OTP continued through...
Spreading the Jam has a guest post today from Santiago Vargas Niño criticising my argument that the OTP was required to notify Burundi as soon as it decided to ask the OTP to authorize the investigation. Here is what he says: Professor Heller cites Article 15(6) to argue that, by receiving information under articles 15(1) and 15(2) of the Statute, the Prosecution has...
At Spreading the Jam, Dov Jacobs defends the Pre-Trial Chamber's conclusion in the Burundi situation that the OTP is not required to notify a state until after the PTC has authorized an investigation. Here are the critical paragraphs from his post: Note the different language used [in Art. 18] depending on whether there is a referral under 13(a) (state referral) or...
Last week I argued that the OTP's failure to ask the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize an investigation prior to Burundi's withdrawal from the ICC becoming effective -- 28 October 2017 -- meant that the Court no longer had jurisdiction over crimes committed on Burundi's territory prior to that date. I still think my legal analysis is correct, but my factual...
Very significant news out of the ICC today: after a decade-long preliminary examination, the OTP has finally decided to ask the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize a formal investigation into the situation in Afghanistan. Here is a snippet from Fatou Bensouda's announcement: For decades, the people of Afghanistan have endured the scourge of armed conflict. Following a meticulous preliminary examination of the...
As has been widely reported, Burundi has just become the first state to formally withdraw from the ICC. The OTP has been examining the situation in Burundi since April 2016, but it did not formally ask the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) to authorize an investigation prior to Burundi's withdrawal becoming effective. So what does Burundi's withdrawal mean for the OTP's preliminary...
I have just posted on SSRN a draft of a (very) long article entitled "Specially-Affected States and the Formation of Custom." It represents my first real foray into both "classic" public international law and postcolonial critique. Here is the abstract: Although the US has consistently relied on the ICJ’s doctrine of specially-affected states to claim that it and other powerful states...
[Riccardo Labianco is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on state-to-state military assistance in times of conflict.] On 10th July 2017, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) delivered its decision regarding the choice of the Secretary of State for International Trade not to halt the transfers of arms between the UK and Saudi Arabia (SA). The...
Over the next three days we will be featuring an online discussion of my SOAS colleague and TAU law professor Aeyal Gross's new book for Cambridge University Press, The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (CUP, 2017). The book develops ideas that Aeyal discussed on Opinio Juris -- in a symposium on the functional approach to occupation -- more...
I am delighted to release the call for papers for a workshop I am organising with Ingo Venzke, my fantastic colleague at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. The workshop is entitled "Contingency in the Course of International Law: How International Law Could Have Been" and will feature an opening address by Fleur Johns (UNSW) and a closing address by Sam Moyn...
Saudi-owned TV news network Al Arabiya aired a video simulation yesterday that shows a Saudi Arabian fighter shooting an air-to-air missile at a Qatari Airways plane. Here is the video: That's bad enough -- but what is truly horrifying is the accompany voiceover, which intones the following: International law permits states to shoot down any aircraft that violates a state’s airspace, classing...
Snapshot of two days in the life of the ICC. On Tuesday, the ICC issued a new arrest warrant in the Libya situation -- for Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a commander in the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), which defected from the Libyan army during the revolution and is currently vying for power with the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The arrest warrant represents...
