Dissent

And now, it seems, we must fear to endure crimes adjudged to have no cognizable author – crimes that everyone knows occurred, but that escape the assignment of responsibility that is supposed to be an essential function of international criminal justice. Crimes adjudged, as one commentator lamented, to have committed themselves. Provoking these dire sentiments…

A previous post discussed the majority opinion in Bayev and Others v. Russia, where the ECtHR found that Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law violated the European Convention on Human Rights. I want to focus on the dissent. While the majority is important for its legal impact, the dissent is important for the window it provides into a non-Western…

In international tribunals it is often the case that a judge will vote in favour of a State that appoints that particular judge or that a judge will vote in favour of their State of nationality where that State is involved in a case before the tribunal. Sometimes, the suggestion is made that these facts show that judges…

Many international tribunals allow for States to appoint ad hoc judges in cases involving that State and where no national of the State is a judge on the Court. It is often said that these judges (and judges of the nationlity of parties)  vote in line with the State that has appointed them (or whose nationality they hold). This seems to be…