General

[Reece Lewis is Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University.] This year marks 40 years since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was opened for signature. This landmark provides an opportunity to reflect on its achievements and challenges it faces today. Leading the way is the Report by the UK House of Lords International Relations and Defence...

[Lorenzo Gasbarri is Research Fellow and Lecturer of Public International Law at Bocconi University.] On Wednesday 2 March, for the first time since the creation of the United Nations, the General Assembly “deplore[d] in the strongest terms the aggression” committed by a permanent member of the Security Council against another UN member. Certainly, permanent members have violated the prohibition of the...

[Shaimaa Abdelkarim is a lecturer at Birmingham Law School. Farnush Ghadery is a Senior Lecturer in Law at London South Bank University. Jay Ramasubramanyam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, Toronto. Rohini Sen is a PhD candidate at Warwick School of Law and an Assistant Professor at the Jindal Global Law School. Kanad Bagchi is a Doctoral...

[Ralph Wilde is a member of the Faculty of Law at University College London, University of London.] Over two decades ago, in 2000, a conference was held in London, entitled ‘international law and the Kosovo crisis’, concerning the NATO bombing of Serbia the year before. At that event, Professor, now Judge, Hilary Charlesworth, characterized international law as a ‘discipline of crisis’ in a presentation subsequently...

[Marc Weller if Professor of International Law and International Constitutional Studies in the University of Cambridge, the former Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and of the European Centre for Minority Issues, a former United Nations Senior Mediation Expert and a Barrister (Middle Temple) at Doughty Street Chambers. He served as advisor in a large number of international...

In an excellent recent blog post at Just Security, Tom Dannenbaum identified four options for prosecuting Russia's unprovoked aggression against Ukraine: [T]he International Criminal Court, an ad hoc international tribunal (whether along the lines proposed at Chatham House or pursuant to a General Assembly resolution), a domestic court exercising territorial jurisdiction (in Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine), or a domestic court exercising...

[Dr Carrie McDougall, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, is author of The Crime of Aggression under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2nd ed 2021, Cambridge University Press) and was involved in the Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression and ICC Assembly of States Parties’ negotiations in relation to the crime of aggression.] This post is a reply to the post published...

[Mateusz Piątkowski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland (Faculty of Law and Administration, International Law Department), Attorney-at-law, and Member of the Polish Society of the Military Law and the Law of War. You can find Part I of this post here.] Under international law, military confrontations between states are measured by their intensity and gravity. To establish...

[Mateusz Piątkowski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland (Faculty of Law and Administration, International Law Department), Attorney-at-law, and Member of the Polish Society of the Military Law and the Law of War. The author thanks Dr Tomasz Lachowski from University of Łódź, Poland and LtnCol. Dr Wojciech Mendel from the Polish Society of Military Law and...

[Marc Weller is Professor of International Law and International Constitutional Studies in the University of Cambridge, a Barrister at Doughty Street Chambers and a former United Nations Senior Mediation Expert. He has served as Senior Advisor in a large number of international peace negotiations and is the co-editor of International Law and Peace Settlements (Cambridge University Press, 2021).] In an earlier...

[Konstantina is a researcher in the programme ‘Human Rights and International Criminal Law’ of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights in Vienna, and PhD candidate at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna focusing on the use of user-generated evidence in international criminal proceedings.] Introduction  Following Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in the last week of February, the international...

[Agata Kleczkowska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland.] Since February 24, the international community has been discussing Russia’s ‘attack’, ‘aggression’, ‘invasion’, or ‘assault’ against Ukraine. While certainly all of these terms rightly describe what happened in Ukraine on the morning of February 24, many seem to forget that there has been an ongoing...