In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Use of Force

29 Apr

[Elvina Pothelet is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva, and a teaching assistant and researcher at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] It is tempting to think of soldier self-defense as a black hole in the galaxy of international law: in the same way as black holes grow continuously by absorbing mass from their surroundings, soldier self-defense seems...

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28 Apr

[Nikhil Purohit is a law student at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, India and the Chief Editor of the Indian Journal of Law and Technology.] India recently tested an Anti-satellite (ASAT) missile by shooting down one of its own satellites. In public announcements, this move was touted as necessary in boosting the defence of space assets of the country. With...

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19 Mar

In a recent post at EJIL: Talk! on the India/Pakistan crisis, Mary Ellen O'Connell references a book chapter in which she suggests that Israel's 1976 raid on Entebbe was the first situation in which a state invoked the "unwilling or unable" doctrine as a jus ad bellum justification for self-defense: Christian Tams, Dire Tladi, and I will soon publish, Self-Defence Against Non-State...

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08 Mar

[Srinivas Burra is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Legal Studies, South Asian University, New Delhi.]  Recent military strikes between India and Pakistan merit analysis to assess their legality under international law. As discussed (here and here), they have relevance to the discussions on the legality of the use of force, particularly in relation to the emerging debates on the...

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06 Mar

[Dhruv Sharma is an LLM Candidate and a Chevening Cambridge Trust Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is an alumnus of the National Law University, Delhi. Utkarsh Srivastava is an Advocate practising in the Courts and Tribunals in India. He is an alumnus of the National Law University, Delhi.] Prologue On 14 February 2019, a dastardly terrorist attack was carried...

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26 Feb

A few hours ago, in the early hours of 26 February, news started trickling in of an Indian Air Force strike in Pakistani territory. There have been ominous rumblings of some form of retaliation for a suicide attack carried out on 14 February 2019, in which 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers were killed in Kashmir, and for which the Pakistani based terror...

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25 Feb

The last time Venezuela faced the plight of war, almost 120 years ago, German and British gunboats deployed outside its ports, blockading them. After turbulent times, Venezuela had run out of money and was unable to pay its debts. In a classic display of pre-UN-Charter jus ad bellum, both the German Empire and the United Kingdom felt fully within their...

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19 Feb

I tweeted a link to the presentation, but I thought I might post it here along with the accompanying slides. Here is the abstract: This presentation will argue that the ICC’s newly-adopted crime of aggression is useless, anachronistic, and yet beautiful. The crime is useless because the jurisdictional regime adopted by the Assembly of States Parties ensures that the Court will...

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11 Feb

[Ralph Janik teaches international law at the University of Vienna, Faculty of Law and Webster Private University Vienna. He specializes in the interplay of international law and international relations. Twitter: @RalphJanik] The crisis in Venezuela could enter a new phase. Juan Guaidó recently flirted with the idea of a US intervention on his behalf when he refrained from ruling out to...

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04 Feb

As I've noted before, the jurisdictional regime at the ICC for aggression is exceedingly narrow. In essence, the Court will have jurisdiction over an act of aggression only in the following situation: 1. The aggressor is a member of the Court, has ratified the aggression amendments, and has not opted out of the Court's jurisdiction. 2. The victim is a member of...

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23 Jan

[Dr. Kubo Mačák is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.] I would like to start by thanking Opinio Juris for providing a platform for the discussion of internationalized armed conflicts in international law. In the title of my opening post, I paraphrased Carl von Clausewitz to suggest that these types of confrontations have become...

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