CERD

Debates on the Chagos Archipelago have long been framed through questions of territorial sovereignty and decolonization, largely as a bilateral matter between the UK and Mauritius. Human rights dimensions have not been absent, as Chagossian claims have appeared in domestic courts, before the European Court of Human Rights, and in several UN mechanisms, but they have not always…

In my previous post, I discussed the bottom line of the ICJ’s UNRWA advisory opinion – essentially the Court’s finding that Israel’s obligations under IHL, IHRL and the UN Charter compelled it not to obstruct UNRWA’s work, in the particular circumstances of the occupied territories. I did not discuss in that post the…

On 9 July 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, the Court) issued its long-awaited merits judgment in Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, a nearly 500-page ruling of unprecedented scale in the Court’s history, which also drew an exceptional number of third-party interventions (discussed here, here, and here). The proceedings consolidated three…

On 12 November 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, ‘the Court’) delivered its ‘twin’ judgments on Azerbaijan’s preliminary objections on jurisdiction in Armenia v. Azerbaijian, and on Armenia’s preliminary objections on jurisdiction and admissibility in Azerbaijan v. Armenia. Both cases, brought in late 2021, invoked Article 36(1) of the ICJ Statute and Article 22 of…