Public International Law

[Rana Moustafa Essawy is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Alexandria University (Egypt).] On the 26th of February, Israel submitted its report, as ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), to demonstrate what measures it has adopted to comply with the Court’s order for provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel case. To recap, the Court ordered...

[Andre Kwok is a former United Nations legal consultant at the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. He was a Westpac Scholar at the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law and is currently a research assistant at the Australian Centre for Space Governance.] Amid calls for criminal investigations into the atrocity crimes committed in...

[Dr Iryna Marchuk is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).] On 5 March 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) dropped bombshell news when it announced the issuance of arrest warrants for Russian top military commanders, namely Sergei Kobylash, a Lietetent General and the Commander of the Long-Range Aviation of the Aerospace Force, and Viktor Sokolov, an Admiral and...

[Elke Schwarz is a Reader and Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen Mary University London.] The scale of violence and destruction in Gaza is difficult to fathom; the sheer existential terror the civilian population experiences is unspeakable. First the shockingly high daily death toll on account of the military campaign, now the unfolding famine which affects children and the more...

[Christian Henderson is Professor of International Law at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Use of Force and International Law (2nd end, CUP, 2023)] Introduction A notable aspect of the International Court of Justice’s decision on provisional measures in the South Africa v Israel case was whether, and if so how, the Court might respond to Israel’s overarching legal justification that it...

[Jennifer Trahan is a Clinical Professor at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs and Director of their Concentration in International Law and Human Rights.] On February 21, 2024, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stated the following in hearings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding the General Assembly’s request for an advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies...

[Dr. Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is a Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London. I would like to thank Kevin Jon Heller, Vidya Kumar, Heidi Matthews, Mohsen al-Attar, and Sarah Zarmsky for their comments on previous versions] Last week, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers released a legal opinion by Daniel Reisner, Roy Schondorf, Josh Kern, and Dov Jacobs (hereinafter the Opinion) in the context of the...

[Johanna Trittenbach is a PhD Candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University.  Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University and Otto Spijkers is a Lecturer of International Law at Amsterdam and Leiden University College (AUC and LUC).] Introduction On 12 February 2024, the Court of Appeal in The Hague ordered the Netherlands...

[Mischa Gureghian Hall (X: @MischaGHall) is a Keck Research Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, researching international criminal justice and its intersections with international humanitarian and human rights law in conflict and post-conflict settings.] The author is grateful to Dr. Jared McBride for his assistance in the translation of Ukrainian documents. In an August 2023 essay, Russian-American journalist and activist Masha...

In a recent article in International Law Studies, I examined two competing positions concerning how sovereignty functions in cyberspace. The first position, "pure" sovereignty, holds that any low-intensity cyber operation that involves non-consensually penetrating a computer system located on another State’s territory violates the targeted State’s sovereignty. By contrast, the second position, "relative" sovereignty, rejects the idea that the mere...

[Kyle Shen is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Occidental College, and studies international organizations’ roles in transitional justice and regime change. The author is grateful to Jeffrey Zerda for comments that greatly improved this blogpost. All errors remain his own.] Within the last two years, two situations under investigation by the ICC have seen the outbreak of major conflicts with allegations...

[Juliette McIntyre is a Lecturer in Law at the University of South Australia and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Audrey Plan is an ERC a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin's Sutherland School of Law.] Introduction The courtroom is, as Bentham once said, a ‘theatre of justice’. Like, fr bruh. Wait, what?  The last few weeks saw, perhaps for the first...