Public International Law

[Todd Carney is a student at Harvard Law School. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Communications. He has also worked in digital media in New York City and Washington D.C.] Though most of the headlines regarding disputed territory in Eastern Europe focus on Crimea and Kosovo, there is another region in Eastern Europe that continues to be in question,...

[Jennifer Trahan is a Professor at the NYU Center for Global Affairs.] On March 5, 2020, the International Criminal Court’s Appeals Chamber issued an extremely significant ruling authorizing the opening of the Afghanistan investigation.  The decision is important in that it confirms the Prosecutor’s discretion in evaluating whether or not to proceed “in the interests of justice” under Article 53(1)(c) of the Rome Statute, thereby allowing the Afghanistan...

On 3 March, news reports indicated that that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (High Commissioner) filed an intervention at the Supreme Court of India, linked to petitions challenging the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 (CAA). This legislation – along with a population and citizenship register – has been the focus of nationwide protests across India.  In brief, the CAA seeks to ease a path...

[Siddharth S. Aatreya is an LLM Candidate in International Law at the University of Cambridge  and a General Editor of the Cambridge International Law Journal.] The Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in Nevsun Resources v. Araya has shone new light on the debate around the horizontal application of international law, particularly international human rights norms. With a 5-4 majority, the court held that Nevsun, a Vancouver-based...

[Dr. Leonie Steinl, LL.M. is a post-doctoral researcher at Hamburg University, where she works in a DFG-project on "Strategic Litigation Networks and Accountability for Gross Violations of Human Rights". Dr. Wenke Brückner currently works as a lawyer in Berlin, specializing in German and international criminal law. Both authors have previously worked on different aspects of the case of Hanan v. Germany for...

[Ciara Laverty is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Dieneke de Vos received her PhD in international criminal law from the European University Institute, Florence and currently works in the humanitarian sector on the prevention of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse.]   On 11 February 2020, Colombia’s Constitutional Court made public its full reasoning in the precedent-setting tutela action...

[Dire Tladi is a Professor of International Law in the Department of Public Law, and a Fellow at the Institute of Comparative and International Law in Africa, at the University of Pretoria.] On 11 February 2020, the government of Sudan took the extraordinary (and yes surprising) decision to surrender the former President, Al Bashir, to Sudan.  The attention that the “Al...

[Todd Carney is a student at Harvard Law School. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Communications. He has also worked in digital media in New York City and Washington D.C.] Over the last three years, the world has seen two European democracies, Slovakia and Malta, face major political scandals regarding the murder of a journalist in each...

[Hadi Dadmehr is a PhD candidate in Public International law at the National University of Iran (SBU). Hadi was Head of Law Department at the University of Zabol, Iran,  for 6 years. You can find him on Twitter @HadiDadmehr.] Some nations are blessed with free, fair and reliable electoral process. Some would like to emulate their success, but there seems to be no opportunity. The recent electoral...

[ Luigi Daniele is Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Trent University, where he leads the undergraduate and postgraduate modules in International Humanitarian Law.] For more than a decade international lawyers have been debating Israel’s claim against the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the situation in Palestine, notoriously based on the argument that no Palestine State exists since ‘the Palestinian Authority lacks effective control over the...