October 23, 2020

Natasa Mavronicola

In an eloquent blog post written in June 2020, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard acknowledged the structural racism and systemic injustice that breed the ‘state-sponsored racial violence’ which the brutal killing of George Floyd so painfully exemplified. She asked:…

August 19, 2020

Michael Fakhri Ntina Tzouvala

Until very recently, international law usually dealt with questions of race and racism through two primary mechanisms: denial and containment. On the one hand, the outlawing and criminalisation of the most egregious forms of racial discrimination contributed to the narrative that international law was the polar…

July 20, 2020

Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne

In her excellent recent post, Sejal Parmar takes us through the UN Human Rights Council’s ‘urgent debate’ on racism in US law enforcement that took place in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in May. That debate was initiated by a draft resolution…

October 26, 2020

Keiichiro Okimoto,

This post is part of a joint blog symposium with the Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog and Just Security exploring the new ICRC Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention. See below for other posts in the symposium. This…

October 22, 2020

Juan Pappier Kyle Johnson

Three years ago last month, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas formally completed demobilization, marking the end of their 53-year conflict with the Colombian government. Over 10,000 FARC members demobilized and handed in weapons in a process verified by a United…

October 1, 2020

Isabella Risini

On 28 September 2020, Armenia lodged a request for interim measures against Azerbaijan in view of the recent reignition of the conflict in and around the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. One day later, the European Court of Human Rights decided to…

October 21, 2020

Maximilian Bertamini

The Security Council’s (SC) decision-making process on the renewal of humanitarian assistance for Syria caused a lot of unease amongst observers of the situation. Only a day after the previous aid program had expired, could a new agreement on the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Syrian…

July 27, 2020

Erin Pobjie

On 1 July 2020 – 111 days after the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic – the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2532. Recognising that the unprecedented extent of the novel coronavirus pandemic “is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace…

June 16, 2020

Dapo Akande

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been engaged in a Preliminary Examination of the situation in Palestine since January 2015. By December 2019, the Prosecutor had come to the conclusion that there is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes have been, or are…

October 12, 2020

Felicity G. Attard Richard L. Kilpatrick, Jr.

The duty to render assistance at sea is a long-established rule of international law. The genesis of this obligation lies in the overwhelming need to protect life at sea. In recent years, the duty has had to respond to challenges posed by the phenomenon of irregular mass migration…

August 27, 2020

Eleni Methymaki Christian Tams

In Part I of this post, we discussed how the Arbitral Tribunal, in its recently-released award in the Enrica Lexie case, approached the question of incidental jurisdiction over questions of immunity. While the Tribunal’s jurisdiction, under Article 288 UNCLOS, was limited to ‘dispute[s] concerning the…

August 27, 2020

Eleni Methymaki Christian Tams

Small(ish) disputes can make for significant holdings. From Nottebohm to Lotus to AAPL v Sri Lanka, the list of relatively limited incidents prompting far-reaching judicial and arbitral pronouncements is long. We may now have to add Enrica Lexie…

October 23, 2020

Natasa Mavronicola

In an eloquent blog post written in June 2020, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard acknowledged the structural racism and systemic injustice that breed the ‘state-sponsored racial violence’ which the brutal killing of George Floyd so painfully exemplified. She asked:…

October 19, 2020

Michael Schmitt

Parts I and II of this series examined cyber election interference as an internationally wrongful act, looking at the two elements of attribution and breach, and in particular at the three sets of primary rules that election interference operations can violate: the prohibition of intervention, the obligation to…

October 16, 2020

Michael Schmitt

Part I of this series examined attribution as the first element of cyber election interference as an internationally wrongful act, and then looked at the prohibition of intervention as a possible primary rule that such interference can breach. Now, in Part II, I will examine the possible breaches…