Public International Law

[Gayane Khechoomian is a former Visiting Professional at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and an attorney admitted to practice in California and Illinois.] Introduction Last year, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court” (ICC), relaunching a sanctions regime with the stated purpose of protecting Americans and U.S. allies from certain exercises of its...

[Sanmay Moitra is a lecturer at Jindal Global Law School, India who has worked on international human rights litigation before international courts and advised on matters involving international law before the Supreme Court of India. He holds an Advanced LL.M. in Public International Law from Leiden University, an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in...

Two years before his assassination, the Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani was interviewed by the Australian journalist Richard Carleton: Carleton: Why won’t your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?Kanafani: You don’t mean exactly peace talks; you mean capitulation, surrender.C: Why not just talk?K: Talk to whom?C: To the Israeli leaders.K: That kind of conversation is between the sword and the...

[Sally Longworth is a Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at Stockholm University and Researcher in public international law at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI). The views expressed in this post are her own and do not reflect the position or understanding of Sweden. This post is the third in a series of analyses on aspects of the recent...

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law and Managing Editor of Opinio Juris. Rain Liivoja is a Professor at the University of Queensland Law School, and a Director of the Asia-Pacific Institute for Law and Security. Netta Goussac is an Associate Senior Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Associate Partner at...

[Arez Rizgari is an Iranian scholar. The author is writing under a pseudonym because they are concerned that this post will subject them to political retaliation or restrictions on their academic freedom by Iranian authorities.] The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has repeatedly targeted Rojhilat (Iranian Kurdistan) parties based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) with missile and drone strikes...

[Sué González Hauck is a postdoctoral scholar at Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg.] In her opening statement, Germany’s Agent adamantly insisted that questions related to Germany’s actual breaches of or adherence to the fundamental rules of international law have no place in the Preliminary Objections phase (CR 2026/30, p. 15, para. 9 (Monar)). Yet, Germany spent a considerable portion of its pleadings...

[Matthias Goldmann is Professor of International Law at EBS University (Oestrich-Winkel, Germany) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.] The recent hearings before the ICJ in the case of Nicaragua v. Germany revolved around preliminary objections. Yet the arguments the parties exchanged reached well beyond questions of admissibility and touched repeatedly...

[Shahd Hammouri is a lecturer in international law and legal theory at the University of Kent, and a senior legal advisor at Law for Palestine. She is the author of Corporate War Profiteering and International Law (CUP, forthcoming 2026).] Germany’s insistence that ICJ advisory opinions cannot become a route around consent in contentious proceedings is doctrinally intelligible. But its argument risks...

[Jinan Bastaki is Associate Professor of Legal Studies at New York University, Abu Dhabi. Victor Kattan is Assistant Professor of Public International Law, University of Nottingham. He is also a Smuts Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2026-7).] The proceedings in Alleged Breaches of Certain International Obligations in Respect of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Nicaragua v. Germany) before the International Court...