Prohibition of Discrimination

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…

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 April 9th, 2024, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered its judgment concerning Belgium’s Hijab (Headscarf) ban on wearing visible religious symbols in Schools. The Court, following its previous notorious trial of SAS v. France, continued to allow the creeping erosion of the right to manifest religion under Article 9 of the European…

Yesterday, the International Court of Justice delivered its groundbreaking advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. (The Court’s opinion and all of the individual opinions of the judges are available here.) The bottom line of the AO is that the…