In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Humanitarian Law

23 Aug

[Demetra Loizou is a Lecturer in International Law and Legal Skills at the University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus.]  Article 8 of the Rome Statute, which sets out the war crimes within the ICC’s jurisdiction, is inextricably linked to the general IHL regime. Paragraph 2(a) refers to the grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (international armed conflicts). Paragraph 2(c) is concerned with the serious violations of Common Article 3 (CA3)...

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21 Aug

[Camila Teran is a lawyer with a LLB in Law and a LLM in International Criminal Law, both from the University of Sussex.] The ICC’s current crisis bears witness to the contentious relationship between the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC (OTP) and States. The OTP’s progress is further frustrated by the small window triggering the admissibility phase that would allow the Prosecutor to formally investigate Colombia....

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12 Aug

[Alexander Gilder is a PhD Researcher at The City Law School, City, University of London. From September he will be a Lecturer in Law at Royal Holloway, University of London.] In recent years UN peace operations have begun to explicitly seek so-called ‘stabilization’. In 2015 the Report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) suggested the Security Council give clarification to how the UN interprets ‘stabilization’....

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09 Aug

[Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore where he heads the Transsystemic Law Cluster. He is also an Associate Fellow of NUS Law. This is the second part of a two-part post.] Recognition of Palestine’s Statehood Since 1988, 138 states (72 per cent of UN members) have recognised a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel on 4 June 1967. The...

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09 Aug

[Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore where he heads the Transsystemic Law Cluster. He is also an Associate Fellow of NUS Law. This is the first part of a two-part post.]  The post in Opinio Juris submitted by Steven Kay QC and Joshua Kern of 9 Bedford Row based on their Article 15 Communication to the Prosecutor...

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08 Aug

A few weeks ago I presented my book on the Peruvian armed conflict at FIL, Lima’s International Book Fair. The book, “Conflicto Armado en el Perú: La Época del Terrorismo bajo el Derecho Internacional” (“Armed Conflict in Peru: The Times of Terrorism under International Law”), published by Universidad del Pacífico Press, explores how politicized misinformation on the conflict’s history has...

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07 Aug

[Sofia Poulopoulou is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University and staff member of the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on IHL.] This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict. The Second Protocol was adopted in 1999 in order to address the...

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13 Jun

As I have discussed before, in March 2018 the Presidency curiously dissolved the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC III) that had been dealing with the Afghanistan situation for six months and assigned that situation to a new PTC. Judge Mindua remained part of the new PTC (PTC II), while Judges Chung and Pangalangan were replaced by two newly-elected judges, Akane and Aitala....

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08 Jun

As expected, the OTP has asked the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) to grant leave to appeal its refusal to authorise the Afghanistan investigation. I'm in Kiev and don't have as much time to write as I'd like, so I just want to offer a few quick thoughts on the OTP's motion, which seeks appeal on three interrelated issues. First, I think it's...

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26 May

This summer we will host our fifth Emerging Voices symposium, where we invite doctoral students, early-career academics and practicing lawyers to tell Opinio Juris readers about a research project or other international law topic of interest. If you are a doctoral student or in the early stages of your career (e.g., post-docs, junior academics or early-career practitioners within the first five...

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