In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Legal education

25 Nov

[Lydia Millar is a PhD candidate at Queen's University Belfast and manager of the Digital Investigation Lab at the School of Law. Felipe Castillejo Gaitán is a Colombian Human Rights and OSINT Researcher, former co-coordinator of the Hertie School Digital Verification Corps] How did your respective open-source investigation labs begin? Lydia (Queen’s University Belfast): In October 2023, the School of Law at Queen’s University...

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24 Nov

[Isabella Regan is PhD researcher at the department of Law, Society and Crime of Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam, focusing on public and private open-source investigations and atrocity crimes. Alexa Koenig, PhD, MA, JD, is a research professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, faculty director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, and director and co-founder of the center's Investigations...

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19 Nov

[Ana Srovin Coralli has written her PhD Thesis entitled ‘The Crime of Enforced Disappearance: Unpacking Omission Liability and Continuity’ at the Geneva Graduate Institute and has worked as a Teaching Assistant at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and the Geneva Graduate Institute] Over the past few years, many Master’s and LLM students have approached me and...

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11 Jul

[Alessandra Spadaro works as Assistant Professor in Public International Law at Utrecht University. She is conducting a three-year project titled “Business in and for war: the role and limits of international humanitarian law”, which is funded by the Dutch Research Council.] In a recent post on this blog, my colleague Jérôme de Hemptinne calls on (Western) international lawyers to engage with...

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07 Oct

[Mohsen al Attar is Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as well as a Contributing Editor to Opinio Juris] Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza—a fifth since its false disengagement in 2006—has once again exposed the catastrophic failures of international law in protecting the world’s most vulnerable from militarism and settler-colonialism. While purportedly targeting resistance, a dubious goal...

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03 Oct

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...

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25 Jul

Twitch is a live-streaming platform launched in 2011 to cater to the growing supply of amateur and professional gamers playing videogames for an audience. Twitch allows the user to stream, simultaneously, footage of themselves and of their videogame at the same time, which meant that gamers could build entire communities around a shared activity. This rapidly grew into much more than just gaming, though. Twitch...

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19 Jan

Universities are in a topsy-turvy state. They face enormous and often contradictory pressures from a mix of protagonists including governments and parents, corporations and alumni. These pressures are dwarfed only by the worries of our students, anxious about the direction of the global political economy and the implications for their futures. Each group looks to the tertiary sector for...

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08 Dec

As a result of the recent decision by the Harvard Law Review to not publish a commissioned article by Palestinian scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, I have signed the following Open Letter, along with 100 more of my fellow international law scholars. I hope others will sign as well (here). I am attaching the full text below. Academic FreedomOpen...

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10 Oct

If you're not careful, [international lawyers] will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.Malcolm X The Power of Mythmaking  Origin stories are always more fiction than fact, more myth than reality. At times, origin stories serve to redeem a dubious past, while at others they enable us to justify an unwelcoming...

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18 Sep

Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. Ibn Battuta From its vantage point atop the Kasbah in Tangier, Morocco, the Ibn Battuta museum overlooks the meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea—a vista coloured by myriad beginnings and a few endings as well. More of a memorial than a museum, the site...

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05 Apr

Dr Mohsen al Attar and (Dr) Omar Kamel Academics are professional thinkers. We might be charitable and describe ourselves as specialised communicators as well. We engage in a variety of roles, ranging from the advancement of knowledge to the teaching and mentoring of students, from guiding policymakers to supporting social movements. Some of these tasks are mundane—setting assessment questions—just as others...

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