In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Humanitarian Law

02 Jul

[Alejandra Muñoz is an International Legal Advisor with a Colombian lawyers' collective, ''Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo (CAJAR)'] In February this year, the long awaited first voluntary statement rendered by Colombian army general Mario Montoya Uribe before the country’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP) sparked a great deal of frustration and disappointment among victims. After refusing to speak entirely on the first day, his declarations on...

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30 Jun

[John B. Quigley is Emeritus Professor of Law at Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.] The annexation, now under consideration by Israel, of land in occupied Palestine is aimed, in part, at bringing many of Israel’s settlements into the territory of Israel. Annexation, however, may bring the unintended consequence of the loss of those very settlements. Much of the land on which the...

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26 Jun

Luca Ferro is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on International ‘Intervention’ in Theory and in Practice, assessing the legality of third-State involvement in the internal and external affairs of other States. Prematurely calling time of death on ‘negative equality’? On 5 and 6 December 2019, the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law (JUFIL) and the...

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26 Jun

[Marie Steinbrecher is currently a teaching fellow at UCL’s Department of Political Science while completing her PhD at Royal Holloway’s School of Law.] The Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) obliges State Parties to designate a National Preventive Mechanism (NPM). NPMs are mandated to visit all places of deprivation of liberty to prevent torture and ill-treatment. To date, 90 States have ratified OPCAT...

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19 Jun

[Dr. Michael Kearney is a legal researcher with Al-Haq.] A March 2020 Amicus Brief submitted by Palestinian human rights organisations, including Al-Haq, to the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court suggested that the Court’s territorial jurisdiction extends to Palestine’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a jurisdictional space derived from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, was proclaimed by Palestine in September 2019....

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18 Jun

[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.] David Eichert’s “Concerns about the non-inclusion of sexual violence against men and boys in the Gambia v Myanmar” raises important points in relation to the characterisation of sexual violence as being a primarily female experience in the clearance operations perpetrated by the Myanmar...

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17 Jun

[Dr. Tamás Hoffmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Legal Studies and an Associate Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest.] Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, the crime of genocide has been universally regarded as the ”crime of crimes” in international criminal law. Article II of...

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15 Jun

[Jennifer Trahan is Clinical Professor, NYU Center for Global Affairs and Megan Fairlie is Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law.] On June 11, Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that exponentially intensifies the United States’ ongoing attack on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its staff.  Disturbingly, the Order also targets foreign nationals and, seemingly, US nationals.  Regrettably (although predictably), the US is again using...

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11 Jun

[Radhika Kapoor is a Harvard Kaufman Fellow at the Public International Law and Policy Group, Washington, D.C.]. The notion of belligerent occupation is of fundamental importance to international humanitarian law in its role as a threshold requirement for relevant provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which contain the standards for humanitarian treatment during conflict. Traditionally, a territory was considered ‘occupied’ when a foreign power...

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10 Jun

[Sarah Kay is a human rights lawyer specializing in counter-terrorism and national security.]  After seeing calls for the application of the 1949 Geneva Conventions in the current context of mass protests in the United States, it is time to return human rights law to where it belongs – that is, in situations of grave wartime injustice and disproportionate use of force. The GCs...

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08 Jun

[Andrea Trigoso is a qualified lawyer with an LLM and experience in International Criminal Justice. She is currently pursuing a MAS in Transitional Justice.] The notification of the Prosecutor of intent to initiate proceedings in February this year renewed hopes of the international community in the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC), mainly because after almost five years of the commencement of its work, very little progress has been...

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