Search: unwilling or unable
10 Sep ICC’s Ocampo Indicates Probe Underway into NATO Actions in Afghanistan
...has the right to try its own citizens for the alleged crimes, and the ICC can step in only after determining a national court was unable or unwilling to pursue the case. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC prosecutor, said in remarks Wednesday that: The ICC’s preliminary inquiry is “very complex,” Mr. Ocampo said. The court is trying to assess allegations of crimes including “massive attacks,” collateral damage and torture, he said, adding that his investigators were getting information from human-rights groups in Afghanistan and from the Afghan government. Anyone following the...
03 Sep Critical Pedagogy Symposium: Put Up or Shut Up–Iconoclasm and Precarious Teaching Contracts in the Neoliberal Academe
...virtual teaching environments exacerbate the pressure of inadequate resources and, in their response to COVID-19, institutions reinforced the assumption that teaching—in this instance, in a virtual environment—is equal amongst teaching faculty. COVID-19 is an unprecedented crisis that disproportionately affects those on the margins in academia. Without sufficient resources, the virtual agenda reduces us to mere sites of extraction. We are valued only as long as we fulfil our role as foot soldiers in the university industrial complex. As unions report, institutions appear unwilling to accommodate the unique circumstances of teaching...15 May John Boonstra on R2P and Burma
I had contemplated weighing in on commentators’ unfortunate tendency to equate the Responsibility to Protect doctrine with humanitarian invasion, but John Boonstra at UN Dispatch beat me to it. Here’s a snippet: First, by and large, the R2P doctrine has been misunderstood or misrepresented in calls to “invade” Burma. R2P is often implied to boil down to a simple equation: if a government is unable or unwilling to adequately protect its citizens, then the international community has a right to forcibly intervene to protect these people. The first part of...
15 Aug Settler Violence as State Wrongful Act and Third State Obligations
...administrative regime in the West Bank is allowing for the institutional unwillingness to prosecute and indict settlers, leading to a systematic lack of law enforcement against settlers. The failure to investigate such incidents have led to impunity and to an increase in the frequency and severity of such attacks. In July 2024, the USA, EU and a handful of countries had imposed sanctions on five individual Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, violent activists, blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, and three Israeli entities. In July 2025,...17 Jul MH17 Downing Suspects to be Prosecuted Before Dutch Domestic Courts – An Obstacle or an Advantage for International Justice?
...comes to gathering evidence, selection of suspects and conducting fair trials, to avoid duplication and wasting resources. In addition, an investigation by the Dutch national authorities will most likely block any investigation by the ICC by virtue of the latter’s complementarity to national courts of its States Parties. According to this principle, states are primarily responsible for investigating and prosecuting international crimes. The ICC only intervenes if states parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC are unable or unwilling to prosecute individuals’ suspected/accused of the most serious crimes of...
09 Sep Contemporary International Criminal Law After Critique Symposium: Accountability for the Unaccountable? Article 15 Communications Beyond the ICC
...some harms while overlooking others – in particular, structural and slow forms of violence more commonly associated with Western states. Even where conduct does amount to an international crime, it can be difficult to attribute responsibility for that conduct to an individual. Prosecuting authorities might face difficulties in ascertaining an individual’s intention or tracing an individual’s contribution through complex organisational structures and across networks of multiple actors. Substantively, even if a person’s conduct is formally criminalised under international criminal law, domestic authorities may be unable or unwilling to take action...26 Sep Updating State Climate Change Activity (Kysar and Meyler Wonder If Its Constitutional)
...of reducing global emissions. As Arnold Schwarzenegger loves to point out, in terms of economic size California would rank fifth among nations. That presumably compensates for the lost chips, especially where we’re looking at an Administration unwilling to use them in the first place. The bargaining chip rationale doesn’t play much of a role in the big foreign affairs preemption cases (Zschernig, Crosby, and Garamendi, among others). Those decisions rest on the danger of a more direct kind of interference in national foreign-policymaking. Going back to Chy Lung, the concern...
27 Sep Symposium on the Current Crisis in Myanmar: This Is What Impunity Looks Like – Myanmar’s Coup Built on Years of Failed Accountability
...military with a sense of reprieve. The unwillingness of the UK, US, and France to press for a resolution in fear of vetoes by China and Russia has ultimately betrayed the Council’s mandate to ensure international peace and security as well as the millions of people risking their lives in Myanmar by opposing the coup. “We will do everything we can to mobilize all the key actors and international community to put enough pressure on Myanmar to make sure that this coup fails,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said days after...
01 May Reject the Dictator’s Playbook: The Importance of Civil Society and States Supporting the ICC Against Threats by the U.S.
...to Israeli conduct in the Palestinian territories, UK conduct in Iraq, and an investigation as to crimes in Burundi. (The proposed UK legislation would not necessarily “help” the UK with its preliminary examination, as the law appears to render the UK largely “unwilling” and “unable” to prosecute, making the situation ripe for ICC prosecution; yet, the legislation would deliver a troubling statement about the permissibility of blocking domestic war crimes prosecutions.) Threats to a judicial institution also carry a clear reputational cost to the US—it appears as if the US...