United Nations Security Council

[Joris van de Riet is a PhD candidate in jurisprudence at Leiden Law School. He holds LLM degrees in Public International Law and in Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law from Leiden University.] In my previous post for this blog on the question of Russia’s membership of the UN Security Council, I explained why the decision in 1991 to regard the Russian...

[Joris van de Riet is a PhD candidate in jurisprudence at Leiden Law School. He holds LLM degrees in Public International Law and in Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law from Leiden University.] In a two-part post for this blog, Thomas Grant has argued that it is both possible and desirable to remove the Russian Federation from the UN Security Council (see...

1 February marks the second anniversary of the coup d’état in Myanmar. In the past year, the situation for the population has only become more fraught and difficult. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 2,890 individuals have been killed, likely an underestimation, 16,000 have been detained on spurious charges, scores have been tortured, many have been sentenced to death,...

Announcements ABILA - Crisis in Ukraine: International Law and Accountability: The ABILA ICC Committee is pleased to co-sponsor a virtual panel on Crisis in Ukraine: International Law and Accountability on Thursday, March 31 at 12:15-1:45 pm ET. Given the tragic outbreak of war in Ukraine and Russia’s flagrant violation of the UN Charter and ongoing commission of crimes, this panel will...

[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...

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...

[Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University (The Netherlands). He is a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute (Italy).] NATO and EU leaders present Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as a storied conflict between geopolitical power and a “rules-based order.”  In the hours that followed the invasion, EU Commission President, Ursula Von...

[Jennifer Trahan is Convenor of the Global Institute for the Prevention of Aggression, and Clinical Professor at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs.] Let us be clear why the United Nations is largely paralyzed in the face of one of the clearest cases of aggression since 1939:  it is because of the veto power of a permanent member of the UN Security...