This blog has regularly published comment on legal issues that emerge in the context of elections to the Bench of the ICJ. For any scholar of the Court, these matters are exciting and interesting, not to mention surrounded by a certain amount of bewilderment as to ‘unwritten rules’, ‘expectations’, ‘customs’, and ‘practices’…

It was widely reported on Sunday that the government of Belarus forced a Ryanair flight bound for Vilnius to land in Minsk on account of a ‘potential security risk’. The flight was escorted to Minsk by Belarussian MiG-29 fighters. As the BBC put it: Flight FR4978 was en route…

In a recent piece on Just Security, Tom Ruys and Felipe Rodríguez Silvestre argue that a state whose territory is unlawfully occupied by another state does not have the right to use of force in self-defence to recover the occupied territory. The post considered the position in relation to the recent armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan…