Photo credit: Harold Stern The world has lost James Crawford, a luminary of international law in the truest sense of the word. Indeed, Judge Crawford was one of the few people alive who could rightly be called a luminary of international law, or a luminary of any field at all. He was, to use Professor Iain Scobbie’s phrase, one of the...
The Power of Depositary, ICC and Palestine’s Quest for Statehood [Saba Pipia is an Associate Professor at the Georgian-American University (Tbilisi, Georgia) and visiting Fulbright researcher at Michigan State University. He holds a Ph.D. degree from Tbilisi State University.] Photo credit: Saba Pipia On February 5, Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced its ruling confirming the Court’s jurisdiction to...
[Dr Ray Murphy is Professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. ] Leanne Smith’s chapter seeks to examine the complexities posed by ensuring respect for IHL in the peacekeeping context. It also explores the relationship between humanitarian actors and peacekeepers. A real strength of the chapter is that much of it is written from what the author refers to on page 153 as a...
[Parisa Zangeneh is a PhD student at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is a recipient of the Hardiman Scholarship.] In 2020, the volume Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law was published as part of the Routledge Research in the Law of Armed Conflict Book Series. Edited by Eve Massingham and Annabel McConnachie, the book explores the various ways in which Common Article 1 (CA1) of...
[Dr Rosemary Grey is a lecturer at Sydney Law School.] Last week’s hearing in the Abd-al-Rahman case, one of the ICC’s long-awaited ‘Sudan’ cases, marks a step forward in the Court’s practice in prosecuting gender-based crimes. It is the first ICC case in which crimes committed exclusively against men and boys have been expressly charged as gender-based crimes (specifically, as persecution on intersecting...
[Valentina Cadelo is a Legal Adviser at International Commission of Jurists' Middle East and North Africa Programme.] Today, Tunisia marked the third anniversary of the opening of trials before the Specialized Criminal Chambers (SCC), the very first example of domestic criminal trials related to past gross human rights violations in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Three years ago, when...
[Ady Niv is a Legal Officer at the United Nations. The author has previously worked at the Chambers of the ICTR, ICTY and IRMCT and at the International Commission of Inquiry for Mali. The views expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.] Introduction The purpose of this contribution is...
[Frédéric Mégret is a Full Professor and Dawson Scholar and co-Director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law, McGill University.] Photo credit: AP Photo/Adel Hana Concerned member of the public (CMP): Gaza! Civilians killed! Lots of them! WAR CRIME!!! LOAC expert: Well, not really. Actually it’s much more complicated than that. Let me explain how this works...
Katharine Fortin has her commentary on Giovanni Mantilla's book up at Armed Groups and International Law and you can find it here. Katharine Fortin is Assistant Professor of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at Utrecht University. She has published widely on the legal framework pertaining to non international armed conflicts and her monograph The Accountability of Armed Groups under Human Rights Law (OUP) won...
[At the time of conceptualizing this post, Iris Mueller was a thematic legal adviser in the ICRC legal division, working mostly on customary IHL. Previously, she was a legal adviser on the update of the ICRC commentaries on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols. She continues to work for the ICRC in a legal capacity.] The regulation of non-international armed conflicts by international humanitarian law (IHL)...
Today, Boyd van Dijk shares his thoughts on Mantilla's book over at Armed Groups and International Law here. Boyd van Dijk is a McKenzie Fellow at the Melbourne Law School. He received his PhD in History from the European University Institute. His most recent publications have appeared in the American Journal of International Law, Law and History Review, and Past & Present. His forthcoming...
[Jeff Deutch, PhD, is Research Director at Mnemonic and co-founder of Syrian Archive. Libby McAvoy, Esq., is a legal fellow with Mnemonic and the Video as Evidence program at WITNESS.] Photo credit: Syrian Archive. Whether in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Hong Kong, Myanmar, the United States, Nigeria, Brasil, or elsewhere, over the last ten years civil society actors have produced and shared more content...