Public International Law

Events Extraterritoriality in International Law Conference: Cedric Ryngaert (Utrecht University) and Austen Parrish (Indiana University Bloomington) are pleased to announce a conference on "Extraterritoriality in International Law" on 15-17 September 2021. The Conference will be held over Zoom (the registration link can be found here) and are scheduled to accommodate speakers from a wide-range of time zones. There are approximately 38...

[Darryl Robinson is a Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law (Canada), specializing in international criminal justice.] In part one of this post, I mapped out the main controversies and choices to be made in defining ecocide.  I now introduce the most difficult conundrum: how to align ecocide with environmental law.  The problems are not initially obvious.  Kevin Heller’s initial posts understandably...

Despite the publication of the MMIWG Report and its findings of an ongoing “race-based genocide” against Canada’s First Nations, issues of indigenous genocide and (neo)colonial oppression have remained side-lined from political discourse in the rest of the American continent. In fact, the situation has arguably worsened: at the same time as Canada protested the unmarked graves of hundreds of indigenous...

[Chiara Redaelli is a Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and a Visiting Professor at the Faculté Libre de Droit, Université Catholique de Lille.] I would like to begin by thanking Opinio Juris, its editors, and in particular Alonso Gurmendi and Jessica Dorsey for organising and hosting this symposium. I would also like to express my gratitude to John Hursh, Brad Roth, Luca Ferro, Erin Pobjie, Laura Iñigo, and...

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...