Study of International Law

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The Human Rights Backlash in Criminal Justice: The Case of Russia’s Exit from the European Convention on Human Rights

August 1, 2023

Large-scale conflicts such as the Russia – Ukraine crisis transform societal structures of the regions involved. Much analysis has already focused on changes in Russian politics, economy, culture, etc. However, some gradual and heterogeneous reconfigurations in Russia’s legal system can easily be overlooked, especially if these do not immediately produce significant political events attracting scholars’ attention. The text below highlights the first consequences of Russia’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR, or “the Convention”), which had been influencing the Russian legal landscape for more than 20 years. I am going to outline several preliminary findings of the research in progress, mostly concentrating on the human rights erosion within the Russian criminal justice system (RCJS). This post draws on semi-structured expert interviews with 6 Russian criminal lawyers having vast experience – ranging from 5 to 25 years – in mobilizing the Convention. Four of them serve as defence lawyers in courts on a daily basis. Additionally, 117 decisions of Russian districts courts, courts of appeal, and cassation courts rendered from…

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Re-enacting ourselves: academic behavior in research seminars

June 29, 2023

This blog is about two similar events: one in Amsterdam, the other in Florence. Both events looked like a normal research seminar. We booked a room, circulated a paper in advance, we arranged a discussant and a chair. A paper was presented and comments and questions followed. It was also meant as a normal seminar, except for one…

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Are sovereignty referendums but a tool to legitimize territorial claims of the powerful?

December 1, 2022

This is the impression one could be left with in the wake of the popular votes organized by Russia in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. This impression might be reinforced by the fact that, as recently shown by Sze Hong Lam on these pages, these were by far not the first…

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Project 2100—Is the International Legal Order Fit for Purpose?

November 29, 2022

It is in the darkest moments that we must ask the hardest questions and peer through the gloom in an attempt to see the light. The events to the east of us raise stark questions—about the current world order; about the place and effectiveness of the United Nations; about what the U.S. long-term assessment of global…

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Facts, intuitions and uncertainties in the jus ad bellum

November 4, 2022

Lawyers disagree about international law governing the resort to force. That much is obvious and evident in numerous posts on this and other sites and in the extensive literature studying controversies in the jus ad bellum. Disagreements between lawyers representing states are easy to attribute to their clients’ clashing interests and ideologies, rather…

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