Public International Law

My friend Chiara Redaelli has produced an impressive volume, thoroughly analysing the topic of intervention in civil wars. As others in this symposium have already pointed out, it is usually difficult to offer comments on what one mostly agrees with. In this post, therefore, apart from congratulating Chiara for a fantastic book, I wanted to add to the conversation by briefly telling the story of...

[Luca Ferro is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI) of Ghent University, and a member of the ILA Committee on the Use of Force: Military Assistance on Request.] An embarrassing confession at the start of this review: I cannot remember the last time I read a book on international law from (digital) cover to cover, instead of scanning through it and...

[John Hursh is a lawyer, writer, and researcher focusing on the use of force, human rights, and international humanitarian law. He served as Director of Research at the Stockton Center for International Law and Editor-in-Chief of International Law Studies at the U.S. Naval War College from 2017 to 2020.] “It can be difficult to write something interesting about something one agrees with.” So wrote Timothy Waters when reviewing Mark Drumbl’s...

Call for Papers Australian Year Book of International Law: Honouring Judge James Crawford: Volume 40 of the Australian Year Book of International Law will be dedicated to the memory of the late H.E. Judge James Crawford AC SC FBA. In addition to a long and distinguished career as an academic, practitioner, arbitrator, and judge, James was a friend and mentor to many. We...

[Cecilia Pechmeze is a public international law practitioner, and the founder of Pechmeze Law. She tweets @ceciliapechmeze.] After a number of failures, Europe has been working on its own version of data infrastructure, GAIA-X, in an attempt to gain its independence from foreign Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). The project is still at its designing phase, a phase some argue it might never complete. Regardless...

[Valerie Oosterveld is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario (Western University) Faculty of Law in Canada and a faculty member with her university’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, also known as Western Space. Anne Campbell is a recent graduate of Western University and a current Western Space summer intern.] Plans for the extraction of water and minerals in outer space – particularly...

[Jason Beckett teaches in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo.] We are taught to think of PIL as noble, benevolent, and weak; a tolerably just legal system unable to impose its will on an unjust world. This vision emphasises ethical PIL, humanity’s law, or international public law. It is an attractive vision, offering a noble, if Quixotic, quest to tame realpolitik....

[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.] There has been a flurry of discussion about the way in which the Rohingya community, particularly in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is receiving information about the various accountability mechanisms. On 7 June 2020 the Registry of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) reported...

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia. Part I can be found here.] A Collective Right to Existence Westphalian international law is not the best platform to address ‘dealing with the past’ issues (Koskenniemi). The Treaty of Westphalia itself contained a legal oblivion clause (Common Article II)...

[Dimitrios Kourtis is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University and a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Nicosia.] Genocide Disparities and Grotian Moments International law has been credited for normalizing, theorizing, and proliferating several systemic injustices, being the ‘culprit and the remedy’(Stahn) of/for an imperialistic order premised on centers and peripheries (Anghie). Although, such statements offer a recapitulation of the use and...

Call for Papers Call for Papers dedicated to the memory of Judge James Crawford: The Australian National University (ANU) is pleased to announce Volume 40 of the Australian Year Book of International Law (AYBIL), which will be dedicated to the memory of the late H.E. Judge James Crawford AC SC FBA. In addition to a long and distinguished career as an academic, practitioner,...

[Maria Xiouri is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bedfordshire. Her book The Breach of a Treaty: State Responses in International Law was published by Brill in March 2021.] On 22 May 2020, the US submitted a notice of its intention to withdraw from the Treaty on Open Skies (‘OST’) to the Treaty Depositaries and to all other States parties to the Treaty (33...