In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Use of Force

11 Jun

[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...

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11 Jun

[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...

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10 Jun

[Sarah Kay is a human rights lawyer specializing in counter-terrorism and national security.]  After seeing calls for the application of the 1949 Geneva Conventions in the current context of mass protests in the United States, it is time to return human rights law to where it belongs – that is, in situations of grave wartime injustice and disproportionate use of force. The GCs...

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23 May

[Federico J. Wynter is a J.D. Candidate and Charles Evan Hughes Scholar at Cornell Law School.]  Venezuela is a reliable source of news. From the late March DOJ’s indictment of President Nicolás Maduro, to the early May bizarre coup attempt against Maduro, in 2020 Venezuela has been a major point of interest for international law and politics. One significant event that...

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22 May

[Andreas Schueller directs the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).] The current German coalition agreement says that the German government “categorically rejects extrajudicial killings, also by drones”. Nevertheless, the German armed forces leased drones that can be armed – yet without the respective weapons. The German government declared that it will employ these drones only in accordance to...

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21 May

[Dapo Akande, Duncan B. Hollis, Harold Hongju Koh, and James C. O’Brien.] Many have recently written about the application of international law in cyberspace and to the global COVID-19 pandemic, but relatively few have examined the intersection between these two areas. Notwithstanding that oversight, recent weeks have seen cyberattacks on organizations at the frontline of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including malicious cyber operations against...

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21 May

[Nathaniel Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture at Brown University. This is the second part of a two-part post.] [In Part One of this essay, I argued for the importance of the reaffirmation of the illegality of annexation of occupied territory. I outlined, and partly responded to, the criticism of this position “from the...

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21 May

[Nathaniel Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture at Brown University. This is the first part of a two-part post.] Israel may be on the brink of formally annexing large swaths of the West Bank. Ever since Trump’s victory in 2016, the pro-settler Israeli right has sensed a historic opportunity to secure its cherished goal:...

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12 May

On May 3rd, a group of 60 Venezuelan expatriates and two American former Green Berets launched an operation to topple the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela. The operation looked more like something out of a bad streaming series than an actual military mission. Their plan was to arrive by boat at a fishing town north of the Capital, Caracas, somehow storm the heavily fortified...

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09 May

[Jonathan Turner is a barrister in London and Chief Executive of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI)] Practising advocates know that what is not included in reply submissions is usually more interesting than what is there. One of the omissions in the ICC Prosecutor’s recent Response on the issue of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in respect of Palestine is that it does not address the argument made by...

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06 May

[Mathias Holvoet works as a Legal Officer at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office of Belgium.] This post is a follow-up post on Kevin Jon Heller’s post ‘the OTP Lets Australia off the Hook’, in which he vehemently criticized the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor’s decision not to open a preliminary examination over the situation in Nauru and Manus Island, after denying to qualify...

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05 May

[Kate Vigneswaran is a Senior Legal Advisor with the International Commission of Jurists.] As other countries across North Africa entered lockdown in March 2020 to prevent and contain the spread of COVID-19, warring parties in Libya ramped up their hostilities. On 24 March 2020, the day after the UN Secretary-General called for a global ceasefire to combat the pandemic, the first diagnosed case of COVID 19 was...

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