In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...
September 2024 António GuterresSecretary-GeneralUnited NationsNew York, NY 10017United States Dear Secretary-General, We are writing to urge the United Nations to initiate a comprehensive global study on apartheid practices and to affirm an inclusive understanding of victims protected from the crime of apartheid. UN experts are increasingly pointing to apartheid practices and policies in different regions of the world, for example, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Myanmar, Afghanistan and North Korea. In light...
[Emily Mullin is a legal intern and lead of the Ukraine Advocacy Initiative atGenocide Watch.] [Dr. Gregory Stanton is the founder and president of Genocide Watch and the Chair of the Alliance Against Genocide.] Overview Since Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, international lawyers have discussed creation of a Special Tribunal for the crime of aggression. Philippe Sands proposed the idea in the Financial Times just four...
[Artemis Akbary is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of ALO: the Afghan LGBT+ Organization. Kirby Anwar is a Senior Legal Fellow at CUNY School of Law and an Advocacy Director for MADRE.] Taliban Soldiers brutally beat a trans woman and cut her hair while passers by gawked. They then blindfolded her, took her to an unknown location, and raped her. In...
[Tatjana Grote is a PhD Candidate at the University of Essex] Once again, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, ‘the Court’) has made its way into the headlines of the world. In its recent Advisory Opinion on ‘Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem’, the Court left no doubt that...
[Jens Iverson is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Leiden University.] Mongolia is obliged by its treaty obligations to arrest Vladimir Putin if it can. It could have, but it didn’t. Why? The answer lies mainly in politics, but also in the cover created by an academic dispute. This post attempts to explain the dispute to those who haven’t been following it, and also seeks...
[Hussein Badreddine is a Ph.D. Candidate in Public International Law at the University of New South Wales, Canberra] Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah and Israel have been engaging in a low-level armed conflict. This conflict has however been intensifying, and further talks about an imminent ground invasion of Lebanon by Israel are on the rise. A previous conflict between Hezbollah and...
[Richard Dicker was the longtime international justice director and is now a senior legal adviser for advocacy at Human Rights Watch. He teaches courses on international criminal courts at Columbia Law School.] Goitom, a 42-year-old ethnic Tigrayan farmer, living in that northern region of Ethiopia, watched helplessly when, on January 17, 2021, Amhara Special Forces – a brutal paramilitary group - beat up and detained Tigrayan men...
[Patricia Vella de Fremeaux is Professor and Head of the International Law Department of the Faculty of Laws, University of Malta. Dr Felicity G. Attard is a lecturer in the Department of International Law at the University of Malta.] In Part One, an overview of the Pact was examined in order to set the context for the following discussion on...
[Patricia Vella de Fremeaux is Professor and Head of the International Law Department of the Faculty of Laws, University of Malta. Dr Felicity G. Attard is a lecturer in the Department of International Law at the University of Malta.] The problem of maritime migration has been at the forefront of the European Union (EU)’s legislative and policy making landscape for decades. The...
[Thomas Skouteris is Associate Professor and Chair of the Law Department at The American University in Cairo. He is also Director of the Access to Knowledge Foundation and Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School.] International law finds itself yet again in a profound crisis—perhaps even a breaking point. The ongoing wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa, and across numerous other locations do not...
[Giovanna M. Frisso is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Lincoln] The colonial aspects of international criminal law have been extensively debated in scholarly literature (see here, here, here and here). Socio-economic and cultural rights, along with discriminatory practices, have either been excluded or only partially addressed within the international criminal law framework. Additionally, international structures tied to resource extraction...