I want to call readers' attention to an upcoming Opinio Juris symposium that is being organized by two fantastic young critical international law scholars, Mohsen al Attar (Warwick) and Rohini Sen (O.P. Jindal). They are looking for a few more contributions, per the Call for Papers -- really a Call for Posts -- below. Note that they would like to...
[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.] David Eichert’s “Concerns about the non-inclusion of sexual violence against men and boys in the Gambia v Myanmar” raises important points in relation to the characterisation of sexual violence as being a primarily female experience in the clearance operations perpetrated by the Myanmar...
[Dr. Tamás Hoffmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Legal Studies and an Associate Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest.] Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, the crime of genocide has been universally regarded as the ”crime of crimes” in international criminal law. Article II of...
[Danilo Ruggero Di Bella is a lawyer at Bottega Di Bella.] This year the Treaty of Paris laying out the status of the archipelago of Spitsbergen (Svalbard) has turned 100-year-old, yet the issues dealt with therein could not be more topical. Tensions are rising among the Contracting Parties to the 1920 Treaty of Paris for the exploitation of the natural resources of Svalbard. These tensions are rooted in...
[Radhika Kapoor is a Harvard Kaufman Fellow at the Public International Law and Policy Group, Washington, D.C.]. The notion of belligerent occupation is of fundamental importance to international humanitarian law in its role as a threshold requirement for relevant provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which contain the standards for humanitarian treatment during conflict. Traditionally, a territory was considered ‘occupied’ when a foreign power...
[Tamsin Phillipa Paige is a Lecturer with Deakin Law School and consults for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in relation to Maritime Crime.] In 2018 I had the privilege of interviewing Seanan McGuire (in her Mira Grant persona) as part of my research project on understanding social perceptions and impacts of issues of law and justice through popular literature. We discussed her bestselling Newsflesh...
Along with 271 of my fellow public international law scholars, I have signed the following open letter condemning Israel's plan to illegally annex large swathes of the West Bank. If you are interested in joining the list, please send an email with your name and affiliation to annexationletter@gmail.com before July 1. I will update this post with new names every...
[Yassir Al-Khudayri is an Aryeh Neier Fellow with the Open Society Justice Initiative working on international criminal justice and anti-corruption. He also specializes in indigenous peoples’ rights and children’s rights with a focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia.] On May 19, 2020, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared the end of all security coordination with Israel and the United States, including the landmark Oslo Accords...
[Stephen Arthur Lamony is an International Law specialist, ex-Senior Foreign Policy Advisor-Amnesty International and ex-Head of Advocacy and Policy at the global Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC).] Introduction: The World Health Organization (WHO), published its first situation report on COVID -19 on January 20, 2020. When it reported a case of “pneumonia of unknown cause” on December 31, 2019. A lot has transpired since then. News...
[Brianne McGonigle Leyh is an Associate Professor of Human Rights and Global Justice at Utrecht University and a Senior Legal Advisor to the Public International Law & Policy Group. She has published widely on accountability, truth-telling, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition.] In the last 10 days, anger and unrest have spread across the United States. Institutions have buckled, streets are burning, citizens attacked. The President takes cues from...
[Sarah Kay is a human rights lawyer specializing in counter-terrorism and national security.] There is such a thing as “covid fatigue”, because the virus is not only present as a global pandemic, it affects our daily lives, our social interactions, the way we work, our human rituals (such as weddings and funerals), It has posed many interdisciplinary legal questions that no one seemed to really be able...
[Dr. Jelena Aparac is lecturer and legal advisor in international law, with a research focused on Business and Human Rights in Armed Conflicts; and a Member of the UN Working Group on mercenaries. This is the second part of a two-part post. This is part of a series of blog posts examining International Criminal Law and the Protection of the Environment, and stems from an expert meeting...