In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Public International Law

23 Sep

From Liberation in Algiers to Pacification in Brussels More than most disciplines, international law has found it difficult to escape the stability of its canon, a series of venerated doctrines and texts that circumscribe legal imagination within the confines of Western thought. Indeed, international law has long stood as an essential feature of the structuring logic of imperial domination—including the doctrine...

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19 Sep

[Louisa Handel-Mazzetti is an Assistant Professor at the Royal Netherlands Defense Academy (NLDA) and a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University] In May 2025, President Trump unveiled the 175 billion dollar plan to build the Golden Dome missile shield, originally introduced in January 2025. Drawing inspiration from Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) and...

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01 Sep

[Kate McInnes is a Vancouver-based criminal defence lawyer and the Principal at Arendt Chambers, Canada's first and only law firm practicing exclusively in international human rights law and international justice] The creation of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (STCAU), a court embedded within the Council for Europe framework, marks a historic effort in securing accountability for...

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26 Aug

[Angel Cabrera is a Mexican human rights lawyer and an Assistant Professor of international law and human rights at the University of Washington Tacoma. He holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from the University of Guadalajara.] In a request submitted last December, Guatemala asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the “Court”) to issue an...

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20 Aug

[Dr Sally Longworth is a researcher and Julia Dalman is an analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency] On 2 May 2025, a Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicle (USV) successfully engaged a Russian fighter jet close to a Russian naval base in the eastern Black Sea. The attack was likely carried out by a Magura-V7. The two-person crew of the fighter jet...

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20 Aug

[Ole Aldag, LL.M. (Aberdeen) is a bar-registered lawyer in Düsseldorf (Germany) and a doctoral student at Bielefeld University] When international law’s core prohibitions are violated in full daylight, accompanied by strained legal justifications of actors showing no restraint in exercising their powers— what remains of its authority? The prohibition on the use of force has always operated in tension with global...

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15 Aug

[Dr. Mais Qandeel is an Associate Professor of International Law at Örebro University, Sweden. She holds a Ph.D. in international humanitarian law from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.] The Israeli ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is not disconnected from the killings, torture, forcible transfer by Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It is...

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11 Aug

This post is the conclusion of a three-part series: What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Using the Counterfactual Method to Evaluate Three Post-Genocidal Futures. You may access Part 1 here, where I argued that the genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians is central to the zionist ethos which, like other settler-colonial movements, seeks to remove the native from coveted...

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11 Aug

[Temelso Gashaw is a human rights lawyer who has previously served as a senior human rights officer at the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC)] Ethiopia, an East African nation marked by tumultuous history of violent conflict, is currently at a critical juncture in its attempt to embark on a journey of confronting its violent past, ending ongoing injustices, and fostering reconciliation...

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08 Aug

[Dr. Emma Irving, M.A., LL.M. and Sabrina Rewald, J.D., LL.M. are co-founders of the Fénix Foundation, a non-profit leveraging technology to advance peace, justice, and accountability, and consultants in international criminal law, human rights and technology] The authors led the research and development of the Leiden Guidelines and the Hala Protocol. On 24 July 2025, ICC Trial Chamber V found Alfred Yekatom and Patrice-Edouard Ngaïssona guilty of a...

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07 Aug

[Gaiane Nuridzhanian is an associate professor at The Arctic University of Norway (UiT)] The legal principle of ne bis in idem proclaims that no one shall be tried twice for the same matter. This principle finds expression in a variety of ne bis in idem rules that define the specific parameters of the prohibition on repeat trial. While the ne bis...

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