In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

05 May

[Hakim Nkengurutse is a PhD candidate in Public Law at CY Cergy Paris University. He is affiliated with the Centre for Legal and Political Philosophy (CY) and the Chair for Public and Comparative Law (Humboldt University of Berlin).] On 2 March 2026, the permanent representative of the Republic of Burundi at the United Nations (UN) notified both the Presidents of the...

|
05 May

[Sakhawat Sajjat Sejan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Law, UITS and Founder of the Bangladesh Center for Refugee Law Studies. Md. Omar Farque is a Lecturer in Law at Eastern University, Bangladesh and the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Center for Refugee Law Studies.] Bangladesh is neither a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol, yet it...

and |
04 May

[Luciano Pezzano is a researcher and professor of human Rights at the University of Business and Social Sciences (UCES, Argentina) and lecturer of public international law at the National University of Cordoba (UNC, Argentina)] In his recent post on Opinio Juris, Davit Khachatryan offers a very interesting reflection on the gravity of uses of force and the hierarchical position of aggression...

|
04 May

[Nicolás Zambrana Tévar LLM (LSE) PhD (Navarra) is Associate Professor at KIMEP University School of Law] In recent weeks, a remarkable public dispute has captured global attention. Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born pontiff, a Chicago-born Augustinian friar named Robert Prevost—and President Donald Trump have exchanged unusually sharp statements over the United States and Israel’s war against Iran. The Pope called Trump’s...

|
04 May

[Seyede Masoumeh Zolfaghary is a Ph.D. student in Public International Law at the Department of Public Law and International Law, SRB, Islamic Azad University (Tehran, Iran)] If the erosion of international law continues, the tragedy of Minab may be repeated. International law is frequently assessed through the binary framework of compliance versus violation. Although analytically useful, this perspective risks obscuring a deeper...

|
01 May

[Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at College of Law at SOAS. Claire Smith is an editor of Emancipating International Law and a PhD candidate at UvA.] Emancipating International Law announces a lofty aspiration. Departing from academic scholarship about race, it invites readers to think about international law and race. In particular, how racism and racialisation enable violent legal...

and |
01 May

Pacific state, regional organisation and civil society leaders are preparing for the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Going into COP30 in Belém last year, they were hoping that Australia would be made the host of this year’s COP31 to make it a “Pacific COP” where Pacific states, those most affected...

|
01 May

[Kamya Vishwanath is an international trade lawyer based in India and will be pursuing her LLM at Georgetown University Law Centre this fall] “If you want to make it as a radical critic these days, slip the word 'body' into your title" Terry Eagleton  ‘Caste’ is a relatively modern concept and a preeminent source of racialized violence in India and the...

|
30 Apr

[Suraj Girijashanker is a Residential Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the nexus between race, empire and international law, particularly in the context of migration] Over the past year, racist violence and abuse targeting Indians across the First World have surged. From attacks on Indian migrants in Ireland to a...

|
30 Apr

The 1990s marked a critical decade in the global recognition of climate change and its impacts. The 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil stands out as a decisive turning point, with states from across the world adopting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In doing so, they acknowledged that high-income countries bear greater responsibility for climate change due...

|
29 Apr

[Yang Han, PhD, is a Research Associate at China Centre, University of Oxford] Racism has been integral to international relations: e.g., scientific racism, social Darwinism, and the “yellow peril” discourses, just to name a few. Racist beliefs were often used to justify colonialism and imperialism, and invoked to instigate violence, hatred, and discrimination. Likewise, the principle of sovereign equality helps states...

|
29 Apr

[Paulina Jimenez Fregoso is an advocacy advisor at the Centre for Reproductive Rights] Intersectionality remains contested. While it includes multiple social categories and personal identities, there is far reaching debate about its contours. While race, class and gender were widely accepted for a time, these were later seen to fall short of the complex dynamics of multiple forms of oppression. Helma...

|