International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

On 19 March 2025, I interviewed Judge Graciela Gatti Santana, President of the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (the ‘IRMCT’ or ‘Mechanism’). It was a wide-ranging conversation in which we discussed, among other things, the downsizing of the IRMCT, attempts to rewrite history in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the sad case of former…

Public monitoring of ongoing conflicts, for example, in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, demonstrates the extent to which both human rights defenders and journalists increasingly rely upon earth observation data (EOD) to ascertain and substantiate facts on the ground. EOD is inclusive of data collected by satellites—such as satellite images,…

Since 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been perceived as a viable instrument for stopping ongoing genocides after the UN political organs have failed to take effective actions to that effect. Thus, under Article IX of the Genocide Convention (1948), South Africa took Israel to the ICJ alleging genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza after Israel’s…

Yesterday the UN Secretary-General reappointed 23 of the 24 Judges of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. The one judge not reappointed was Judge Aydin Sefa Akay of Turkey, who is one of hundreds of Turkish judges purged by the Erdogan regime, which accused him of being a member of a terrorist organization. This…