In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Use of Force

15 Jan

[Bill Boothby is an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.] After establishing key trends in the evolution over centuries of the law relating to conflict, and having put forward a convincing methodology, the attempt to give meaning to the notion of the internationalisation of a conflict is the task of the first substantive chapter. Numerous ways in which...

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15 Jan

[Susan Breau is a Professor of Law and the Dean of the Law Faculty at the University of Victoria.] Kubo Mačák’s book Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law represents an important contribution to international law scholarship. The comprehensive discussion of the conditions in which a non-international armed conflict (hereafter NIAC) may evolve into an international armed conflict (hereafter IAC) is particularly...

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14 Jan

[Dr. Kubo Mačák is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.] Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria, announced characteristically through a Twitter post, has once again brought the ongoing hostilities in the Middle Eastern country into international spotlight. More than seven years into the conflict, its origins in a series...

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14 Jan

Over the coming ten days, we are proudly kicking off the new year with our first book symposium of 2019 on Kubo Mačák's new book, Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law, published by Oxford University Press. In addition to comments from Kubo himself, we have the honor to hear from this list of renowned scholars and practitioners: Laurie Blank, Bill Boothby, Susan...

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08 Jan

On January 4th, the Lima Group – an informal gathering of 14 states seeking multilateral solutions to the humanitarian, democratic, and economic crisis in Venezuela – issued its latest statement, on the upcoming inauguration of Nicolás Maduro as President of Venezuela (see here for Spanish version). The statement called for the non-recognition of the legitimacy of Maduro’s government and called...

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04 Jan

[Sergey Sayapin LLB, LLM, Dr. iur. is an Assistant Professor in International and Criminal Law at KIMEP University’s School of Law, Almaty, Kazakhstan, since 2014, and Director of the LLB in International Law Programme.]  Introduction On 25 November 2018, Russia attacked and seized three Ukrainian navy vessels, which were on their way from Odessa to Mariupol. Russia´s Federal Security Service...

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22 Nov

[Mona Ali Khalil is an internationally recognized public international lawyer with 25 years of UN and other experience dealing with the rule of law and international peace and security efforts including peacekeeping, sanctions, disarmament and counterterrorism.] In the face of a veto by any permanent member of the UN Security Council blocking enforcement action against the mass atrocities in Palestine, Myanmar,...

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14 Nov

[Christian Marxsen is head of the Max Planck Research Group “Shades of Illegality in International Peace and Security Law” at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.] Jutta Brunnée has offered us a very sharp analysis of the current challenges to international law. While I largely subscribe to her argument, I would like to...

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13 Nov

[Jutta Brunnée is Professor of Law and Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. This essay is based on a keynote presentation given at the annual conference of the Canadian Council on International Law in Ottawa, on November 2, 2018. It draws in part on Jutta Brunnée, “Multilateralism in Crisis,” forthcoming in American Society of International...

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08 Nov

As evidenced in Part I, Latin American states have not been keen to allow expansive interpretations of the rules for use force in foreign soil. Latin America is a region historically subjected to foreign intervention, and as such, the rules it designed, especially in the pre-Charter era, were always very much thought out from a perspective of protecting “the invaded”,...

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07 Nov

Ever since its very first articulations, the “unwilling or unable test” has relied heavily in the time-tested legitimacy of the 1837 Caroline Affair, where British forces sunk a vessel manned by Canadian rebels in American territory. Dressing such a visible and well-known case in the cloth of “unwilling or unable” allows its proponents to argue that its underlying principles have...

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