International Humanitarian Law

[Jeroen van den Boogaard is a legal counsel for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a lecturer in international humanitarian law at the University of Amsterdam. He writes this post in his personal capacity. This is the seventh and final piece in a series of analyses on aspects of the recent adoption of the 2024-2026 CCW GGE LAWS report.] In...

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law and Managing Editor of Opinio Juris. This post is the sixth in a series of analyses on aspects of the recent adoption of the 2024-2026 CCW GGE LAWS report.] Introduction This post traces the trajectory of the concepts of responsibility and accountability across successive iterations of the GGE's Rolling...

[Sally Longworth is a Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at Stockholm University and Researcher in public international law at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI). The views expressed in this post are her own and do not reflect the position or understanding of Sweden. This post is the third in a series of analyses on aspects of the recent...

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law and Managing Editor of Opinio Juris. Rain Liivoja is a Professor at the University of Queensland Law School, and a Director of the Asia-Pacific Institute for Law and Security. Netta Goussac is an Associate Senior Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Associate Partner at...

[Arez Rizgari is an Iranian scholar. The author is writing under a pseudonym because they are concerned that this post will subject them to political retaliation or restrictions on their academic freedom by Iranian authorities.] The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has repeatedly targeted Rojhilat (Iranian Kurdistan) parties based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) with missile and drone strikes...

[Sué González Hauck is a postdoctoral scholar at Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg.] In her opening statement, Germany’s Agent adamantly insisted that questions related to Germany’s actual breaches of or adherence to the fundamental rules of international law have no place in the Preliminary Objections phase (CR 2026/30, p. 15, para. 9 (Monar)). Yet, Germany spent a considerable portion of its pleadings...

[Matthias Goldmann is Professor of International Law at EBS University (Oestrich-Winkel, Germany) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.] The recent hearings before the ICJ in the case of Nicaragua v. Germany revolved around preliminary objections. Yet the arguments the parties exchanged reached well beyond questions of admissibility and touched repeatedly...

[Shahd Hammouri is a lecturer in international law and legal theory at the University of Kent, and a senior legal advisor at Law for Palestine. She is the author of Corporate War Profiteering and International Law (CUP, forthcoming 2026).] Germany’s insistence that ICJ advisory opinions cannot become a route around consent in contentious proceedings is doctrinally intelligible. But its argument risks...