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The European Court’s Admissibility Decision in Ukraine and the Netherlands v Russia: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Part II

January 26, 2023

In the first part of this post I talked about the (many) good things about the European Court’s admissibility decision in Ukraine and the Netherlands v Russia. In particular, the conclusion that Russia controlled the separatist areas of Eastern Ukraine from 2014 up to the oral hearing in the case in 2022 and (as the Court will inevitably find) to this day is legally and factually unimpeachable. It will be applied in all future cases dealing with the Ukrainian conflict. In this good category we can also include, albeit with a bit of hesitation, the Court’s approach to the jurisdiction issue regarding the downing of the MH17. Essentially the Court found that the missile that downed the MH17 was fired from Russian-controlled territory and that the plane was hit in the airspace above Russian-controlled territory, so that the spatial model of jurisdiction could apply here as well. It is therefore clear from the ample evidence before the Court that, unlike in the case of the artillery attacks discussed above, both the…

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The Law of Immunity and the Prosecution of the Head of State of the Russian Federation for International Crimes in the War against Ukraine

January 16, 2023

The debate on how to prosecute the international crimes linked to the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine is ongoing (for example, here, here and here). One of the most prominent aspects of the debate concerns the question of how to prosecute the persons who are allegedly most responsible for such crimes, particularly, the…

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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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Civilians are Protected Under GC IV 1949: The Illegality of Russian Filtration Camps under IHL

November 30, 2022

This piece examines the illegality of Russian filtration camps considering International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Filtration camps are set up by Russia for Ukrainian civilians implicated in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The illegality of such camps is to be presumed in IHL rules on civilian internment contained in Geneva Convention IV 1949 (GC IV). While IHL does not contain…

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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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