Public International Law

[Mohamed S. Helal is Associate Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University; and member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration as well as of the African Union Commission on International Law.] Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: The Narrative of Indifference is an exhaustively researched and lucidly written volume that makes important contributions to both the history...

[Alexandra Hofer is Assistant Professor in Public International Law at Utrecht University.] I should probably start by admitting that I am not indifferent to Dr Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting the Histories of the Use of Force: The Narrative of ‘Indifference’ (apologies for the poor wordplay). I first heard Agatha present her research in December 2015, during one of the seminars of Ghent University’s International Order & Justice...

[Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School.] ‘it is the position of the State Party that, the acts complained of have neither the required level of intensity or cruelty nor the impermissible purpose to permit them to be defined as torture. Further, the acts complained of do not meet the standard so as to fall within...

[Máiréad Enright is Professor of Feminist Legal Studies at Birmingham Law School.] On October 31 2022, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) published its decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland. Mrs. Coppin is 73 years old and spent her early life in State-funded, religious-run carceral institutions. She was born in a county home to a teenage single mother. Aged two, she...

[Kate Pundyk is the former Open Source Investigation Lead at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and previously worked at the Berkeley Human Rights Center. She is currently studying at the Oxford Internet Institute on a Rhodes Scholarship.] Author’s note: I am grateful to Adriano Belisario and Jorge Ruiz Reyes for their conversations conceptualizing this article, as well as those who agreed...

[Cris van Eijk is an international lawyer researching what it means to make space 'common', and how international law works to effect that. He holds a BA and LLM in International Law from Leiden University, and a BA in Law from the University of Cambridge.] Introduction Satellite imagery is one of the most important sources of data in open-source intelligence, and today...

[Raquel Vazquez Llorente is the Head of Law and Policy, Technology Threats & Opportunities at WITNESS. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.] Information available on the internet can open a window into international crimes and human rights violations occurring in countries otherwise closed to investigators. Social media platforms have become unforeseen repositories of...

[Raja Althaibani is a Senior Program Manager at WITNESS, who manages the organisation’s MENA program and projects in Syria and Yemen, and specialises in community-based documentation in conflict zones.] [Libby McAvoy is a Legal Advisor for Mnemonic where she specialises in digital evidence archives, litigation support, and open source investigations into international crimes and human rights violations.] [Dalila Mujagic is the Legal...

[Michael Elsanadi is a trainer and researcher with Mnemonic and is currently pursuing an MA in Data in Culture and Society at King’s College London.]  In the past ten years, the open source investigations space has exponentially grown. The increasing presence of OSINT bios, dedicated accounts, and general discussion demonstrates the familiarity and presence of open source investigative reporting and methods...

[Sylvanna M. Falcón is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the director of the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas and the Human Rights Investigations Lab.]  [Alexa Koenig is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, a lecturer at the School of Journalism, and co-director...