[Tjorben Studt is a fully qualified lawyer in Germany and a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Air Law, Space Law, and Cyber Law at the University of Cologne.] On 14 September 2026 the US Secretary of the Air Force disclosed that the Space Force has on-orbit space control weapons to ensure the protection of US interests in outer space. While...
Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza turns twenty next year. In the context of state-to-state violence and of an anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, the Israeli action is unique, subverting so many authorities at once: the ICJ, the ICC, the UNGA, and countless international and regional civil society organisations. Since the blockade began, Israel has inflicted catastrophic levels of suffering to impose...
[R. Scott Adams is a PhD candidate at Adelaide University.] Jus contra bellum is the raison d’être of modern international law. When that regulation becomes impotent, prescriptions of conduct within war, jus in bello, emerge to meet the purpose of the law. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello seek two complementary goals: First to prevent war; second to reduce suffering...
[Ashley S. Kinseth is an international human rights lawyer working on atrocity crimes and statelessness and a member of the Genocide Experts Working Group convened by Genocide Watch. She has conducted field research in Myanmar's Rakhine State and in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh and India.] In Part I, I described the elaborate system of permits, arbitrary taxes, village labor quotas, and...
[Ashley S. Kinseth is an international human rights lawyer working on atrocity crimes and statelessness and a member of the Genocide Experts Working Group convened by Genocide Watch. She has conducted field research in Myanmar's Rakhine State and in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh and India.] Rohingya fleeing Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State pay $300 to $500 for documents to get past Arakan...
[Dr Emily Camins is a lecturer in international humanitarian law at the University of Western Australia Law School.] On 6 July 2026, a small AI-guided Russian drone crashed into a wall and exploded in the town of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, killing 19-year-old university student Tetiana Bubynets, as well as Oleksiy Svirin, 41, and Roman Karpiy, 48. The drone had been programmed by...
[Dr. Pouria Askary is an Associate Professor of International Law at Allameh Tabataba’i University. Dr. Katayoun Hosseinnejad is an independent researcher and consultant.] On August 24, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury launched a new economic campaign against Iran, which it described as targeting the country’s “lifelines”. The so called “Operation Economic Outcast” as reflected in the statement of the Secretary...
[Zachary Marcone is a U.S. lawyer and degree candidate at Stanford Law School.] On 9 October 2026, the United States sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an institution. Although the United States previously sanctioned individual ICC prosecutors and judges, this is the first time it has specifically targeted the institution itself. The U.S. sanctions are an existential threat to the...
[Gregory S. Gordon is Professor of Law at Peking University School of Transnational Law and author of Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford University Press, 2017). A former prosecutor with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the U.S. Department of Justice, including in the Office of Special Investigations and as a Special...
Let’s start with the obvious: with Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor, Professor Gregory Gordon has written the definitive biography of Ben Ferencz, one of the most important figures in the history of international criminal law. The book is compulsively readable, with the ideal balance of, for lack of a better description, the personal and the legal. In terms of the personal, thanks...
[Ambassador Beth Van Schaack is a Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Human Rights and International Justice and served as the sixth U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice (2022–2025). Formerly the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School and Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues (2012–2013), she is the author of Imagining Justice...
[Margaret E. (Peggy) McGuinness is Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, where she directs the LL.M. in Transnational Legal Practice. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer and special assistant to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, she co-edited the award-winning Research Handbook on Law and Diplomacy (2022) and Words Over War: Mediation and Arbitration to Prevent Deadly...