Non-State Actors

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Does Israel Have the Right to Defend Itself?

This is a deceptively simple question. It has several possible answers, each of which rests on different (and highly contested) assumptions. In this post I will try to explain what these possible answers are, and what are their implications. I don’t myself know what the ‘correct’ answer here is. It is not my intention to argue for one. I should not be taken as doing so, even implicitly. Rather, my point is simply that, as applied to Israel, Palestine and Gaza, the jus ad bellum is a mess. Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is not, legally, an open-and-shut, clear-cut situation. We do have such clear situations – it is reasonably clear, in my view, that the US and UK committed aggression when they invaded Iraq in 2003, as it is even clearer that Russia committed aggression against Ukraine. But Gaza is not such a case. There are two further arguments that I want to make. First, that many who think there is a single, clearly correct answer to the question whether…

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The Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty for Core Crimes: Filling the Gap?

Since 2011, work has been underway in the Mutual Legal Assistance Initiative (MLAI) to create a modern, procedural, multilateral treaty on mutual legal assistance and extradition, which better facilitates cooperation between states in the prosecution of international crimes. However, recent drafts of the Convention on International Cooperation in the Investigation and Prosecution of the Crime of…

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The European Commission’s proposal for a directive on corporate sustainability due diligence: two paradoxes

On 23 February 2022, the European Commission (EC) published a proposal for a directive on corporate sustainability due diligence (proposal). The proposal has already attracted much scholarly and stakeholder commentary. In this blog we focus on two significant issues not yet addressed. First, the proposal does not  refer to European regional human rights instruments such as the…

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“Friends of the court” making the most of Amicus Curiae with UN Treaty Bodies

The practice of submitting Third Party Interventions (TPIs) – also known as Amicus Curiae briefs - is well established in Commonwealth jurisdictions, and it has become common practice within regional mechanisms such as the Inter-American and European Courts of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ rights. Similarly, most of the eight UN…

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The International Law of Intelligence Sharing in Multinational Military Operations: Concluding Thoughts

Having canvassed the various conceptual questions of state complicity in the prior posts in the series, we can now return to the two basic intelligence sharing scenarios I outlined in my first post – the sharing of intelligence facilitating a wrongful act, and the receipt of intelligence that was unlawfully collected and/or shared. In both scenarios the causal…

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