Last Friday, Pre-Trial Chamber I issued an Order Convening a Status Conference to consider the OTP's request for a ruling on whether the ICC has jurisdiction over Myanmar's deportation of the Rohingya to Bangladesh -- an issue I discussed here. According to the Order, the status conference will be held "on 20 June 2018...
[Jean Galbraith is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.] Yesterday, President Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Iran deal. He is not claiming any major breach by Iran, but rather withdrawing because, in his view, it was a terrible deal from the start. As a matter of domestic and international law, he has...
We have published a series of fascinating posts in recent days debating whether the permanent members of the Security Council have a legal obligation under the UN Charter not to veto resolutions calling for the investigation or prosecution of atrocity crimes. Jennifer Trahan argued yes; Mohamed Helal responded no; and Trahan replied yes again. I am not convinced by Trahan's response...
I had the pleasure of participating yesterday in a superb -- and long! -- panel on the 2013 siege of Eastern Ghouta. The panel discussed the facts, the law, and the politics of the siege. I was joined by Hussam Alkatlaby, the Executive Director of the Syrian Violations Documentation Centre; Joost Hiltermann, programme director for Middle East & North Africa at...
I like much of what Jennifer Trahan says in her recent post about the permanent veto. But I would take issue -- unsurprisingly -- with her claim that "there is in fact more past precedent for reliance on the doctrine of humanitarian intervention than is often recognized, including not only NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, but also African and Arab...
You go to war with the President you have, not the President you wish you had. We should keep that basic truth in mind as the US inches ever closer to war with Syria -- and potentially with Russia, a far more terrifying possibility. Donald Trump does not care about civilians in Syria. He does not care about containing the spread...
In my previous post, I offered three cautionary thoughts about the OTP's decision to ask the Pre-Trial Division to hold that the ICC has jurisdiction over Myanmar's deportation of the Rohingya to Bangladesh. In this post, I want to offer a few thoughts on what a successful outcome would mean for refugee crises elsewhere -- particularly in Libya and Syria. We...
Major news out of the ICC today: the OTP has formally asked the Pre-Trial Division to determine whether the Court has jurisdiction over the deportation of the Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Here is the introduction of the OTP's brief: 1. The Prosecution seeks a ruling on a question of jurisdiction: whether the Court may exercise jurisdiction over the alleged deportation...
As Patryk Labuda noted earlier today on twitter, the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) has ordered the OTP to provide it with additional information concerning the investigation in Afghanistan. Here are the key paragraphs of the order: 3. The Chamber observes that the Prosecutor seeks authorisation to initiate an investigation for crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan from 1 May 2003 onwards,...
Nikolas Stürchler, the Head of International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Justice Section at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, has a new post at EJIL: Talk! discussing the ASP's decision to completely exclude states parties from the crime of aggression unless they ratify the aggression amendments -- the "opt-in" position advocated by a number of states, most notably...
Justice in Conflict has a guest post today from a scholar who has written a book about the Lubanga trial. I think the post makes some excellent points about the problems with the trial. But I have serious reservations -- acknowledging that I have not read the book -- about the author's take on why the trial did not focus...
Although aggression received most of the attention at the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) last month, the ASP also adopted a series of amendments to Art. 8 of the Rome Statute, the war-crimes provision, prohibiting the use of three kinds of weapons in both international armed conflict (IAC) and non-international armed conflict (NIAC): [W]eapons, which use microbial or other biological agents, or...
