North and South Korea are holding fresh talks on reopening the Kaesong joint industrial park, ahead of South Korea-US military exercises next week. United Nations inspectors are investigating a North Korean ship caught carrying arms from Cuba amid suspicion that the vessel is in breach of a wide-ranging arms embargo on North Korea. British energy giant BP is suing the US government...
Another person who should know better has misrepresented the ICTY's specific-direction requirement: Owen Bowcott, a legal correspondent for the Guardian. Here is the sub-headline of his new article on the impact of the Perisic judgment: Legal experts say proof that accused 'specifically directed' atrocities now required after tribunal acquits Serbian commanders. And here is the first paragraph of the article: Generals and politicians...
UK authorities announced that they are considering legal action against Spain to force the country to loosen border controls in Gibraltar. In response, a Spanish foreign minister said that Spain will not back down on implementing tighter controls at its border with the disputed British territory of Gibraltar, escalating the row between the two countries. U.S. hopes of landing a coveted deal worth...
I want to welcome a promising new member of the international criminal law blogosphere -- Beyond the Hague. The blog is refreshingly international, as befits an ICL blog; its current contributors are Alex Fielding, Manuel Eynard, Maria Eleni Vignoli, Maria Radziejowska, Paul Bradfield, and Peter Dixon. I particularly want to single out a fantastic post by Alex Fielding on Judge Harhoff's...
[Žygimantas Juška is a member of the defense team of Radovan Karadžić] One of the most high-profile cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić—provides an opportunity to propose changes for the standby counsel model. Nevertheless, the ICTY has struggled to balance the effectiveness of standby counsel and its huge financial burden on the Tribunal. The ICTY previously...
India and Pakistan have exchanged more gunfire across the disputed border in Kashmir, as a 10-year ceasefire frays over accusations of killings of soldiers deployed on the frontline. Israel published a list of 26 Palestinian prisoners set to go free within days, some after spending more than two decades behind bars, in the first stage of a deal that led to a...
This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin marvelled at Libya's flexible approach to time. He also posted NASA's visualization of the warming world since 1880, which Chris followed up on with a discussion of a recent report linking climate change to a surge in armed conflicts. In our Emerging Voices series, Gilad Noam discussed three ways of conceptualizing admissibility challenges at the ICC, and the implications for the...
[Marta Bo is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Genova, Italy and a member of the Peace and Justice Initiative. She wrote this post while she was a Visiting Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law] Over the past few years, several proposals have been made to put an end to the culture of impunity persisting among Somali...
Tensions are escalating at the India-Pakistan border region of Kashmir, with India for the first time directly accusing Pakistan's army of involvement in an ambush that killed five Indian soldiers, and Pakistan's military accusing Indian forces of wounding a Pakistani civilian after opening fire. In other escalating-tensions news, four Chinese ships spent more than 24 hours in what Japan sees as its territorial waters, prompting...
[Aqsa Mahmud graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and currently practices as a government attorney in Washington, DC] The international community’s application (or nonapplication) of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to the recent Arab conflicts highlights notable limits to R2P. R2P is a relatively new doctrine that holds States responsible for protecting their populations and, where the sovereign fails, allows...
Two Pakistani soldiers were wounded in an exchange of fire with Indian troops along the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir in the latest flare-up of tensions. The Leiden Law Blog has published an analysis on the Guatemalan genocide case against former president José Efraín Ríos Montt. The recent closures of US and UK embassies around the Middle East and Africa were allegedly prompted by...
[Robert Charles Clarke is a Research Associate at the Supreme Court of Western Australia] It could as well be said that Darré, for example, is guilty of murder of numerous people in the occupied portion of Russia, because, as Minister of Food, he had charge of the Food Estate and supplied the food that maintained the Einsatzgruppen in that territory; that it was...
