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[Samay Jain is a legal researcher and scholar from Symbiosis Law School, Pune] On 7 January 2026, the Trump administration published a Presidential Memorandum directing the withdrawal of the United States from sixty-six international organisations simultaneously, comprising 31 UN entities and 35 non-UN bodies, spanning climate, labour, migration, peacebuilding, and the rule of law. The list included the UNFCCC, the International...

[Hakan Kaplankaya is a former Turkish diplomat, lawyer and instituDE member] On 16 December 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR” or “the Court”) found violations of Articles 7 and/or 6 § 1 of the Convention in respect of 2,420 applications in Yalçınkaya follow-up cases. The applicants are (perceived) members of the Gülen Group, which has been targeted by the...

[Himanil Raina is a final year PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID). He completed his B.A. LL.B (Hons) from the NALSAR University of Law and is also an Honorary Adjunct Fellow at the National Maritime Foundation.] In mid-February, the frigate IRIS Dena (75), the oiler IRIS Bushehr (422) and the...

[Konstantinos Deligiannis-Virvos is a PhD Research Fellow with the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea (NCLOS) at the Law Faculty of UiT-The Arctic University of Norway] The illegal armed attack against Iran by Israel and the US on February 28, 2026 prompted Iran to “close” the strait of Hormuz to international navigation. The attack against Iran clearly contravenes Art....

[Gustavo Leite Neves da Luz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University. He holds a PhD in international law from the University of Hamburg.] International law is not dead. Its treaties remain in force, and its institutions operate. Its vocabulary still shapes the language through which power is exercised, contested, and justified. But something else has become difficult to sustain: the...

[Rob Grace is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies and a Senior Researcher for the Beyond Compliance Consortium, based at the University of York] There is no denying that these are dark days for the law of armed conflict. Millions of people across the globe suffer the brutal physical, emotional, and...

[Hakim Nkengurutse is a PhD candidate in Public Law at CY Cergy Paris University. He is affiliated with the Centre for Legal and Political Philosophy (CY) and the Chair for Public and Comparative Law (Humboldt University of Berlin).] On 2 March 2026, the permanent representative of the Republic of Burundi at the United Nations (UN) notified both the Presidents of the...

[Sakhawat Sajjat Sejan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Law, UITS and Founder of the Bangladesh Center for Refugee Law Studies. Md. Omar Farque is a Lecturer in Law at Eastern University, Bangladesh and the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Center for Refugee Law Studies.] Bangladesh is neither a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol, yet it...

[Luciano Pezzano is a researcher and professor of human Rights at the University of Business and Social Sciences (UCES, Argentina) and lecturer of public international law at the National University of Cordoba (UNC, Argentina)] In his recent post on Opinio Juris, Davit Khachatryan offers a very interesting reflection on the gravity of uses of force and the hierarchical position of aggression...

[Nicolás Zambrana Tévar LLM (LSE) PhD (Navarra) is Associate Professor at KIMEP University School of Law] In recent weeks, a remarkable public dispute has captured global attention. Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born pontiff, a Chicago-born Augustinian friar named Robert Prevost—and President Donald Trump have exchanged unusually sharp statements over the United States and Israel’s war against Iran. The Pope called Trump’s...

[Seyede Masoumeh Zolfaghary is a Ph.D. student in Public International Law at the Department of Public Law and International Law, SRB, Islamic Azad University (Tehran, Iran)] If the erosion of international law continues, the tragedy of Minab may be repeated. International law is frequently assessed through the binary framework of compliance versus violation. Although analytically useful, this perspective risks obscuring a deeper...

What follows is a long written interview I conducted with Sareta Ashraph, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in London and the co-founder of ATLAS Women, "a global community of female-identifying lawyers, activists, and jurists with expertise in various facets of public international law." Ashraph is currently serving as Lead Counsel for Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the ICC, in...