‘It is the responsibility of this body to stop the war’, Ukraine’s representative told the UN Security Council on Wednesday this week. He was interrupted by the current President of the UN Security Council who clarified ‘this isn’t called a war, this is called a special military operation in the Donbas’. In this moment, the Ukrainean representative…

Being an international lawyer can sometimes feel like being a librarian in the middle of a riot. You are deeply invested in the idea that there are rules – impeccable legal rules – that, if followed, would make the world a better, more orderly, place. You clutch well-thumbed and thoroughly annotated copies of the Nicaragua case,…

We are grateful for this letter. It raises important and difficult issues. These are issues that must be identified, aired, discussed, specified and further discussed. This letter has spurred such a process. The symposium that the letter objects to focused on the question of the identification of custom in international humanitarian law. It consisted…