Parimal Kashyap
Introduction
The growing tension between the United States and Iran took a sharp turn when the United States launched drone strikes at Baghdad international airport resulting in the death of Qasem Soleimani, the Commander of Iran’s Quds Force and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of Kataib Hezbollah . Soleimani was massively influential in the Middle East and was generally considered as the second most powerful man in Iran. Continue reading
Ryan Bocock
Introduction
It has been over two years since the UN Human Rights Council urgently dispatched an Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (“FFM”) to report on the ongoing persecution of Rohingya Muslims, as part of “clearance operations” carried out by Myanmar’s security forces, with “genocidal intent”. While the UN Security Council (“UNSC”) remains silent on the more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled into neighbouring Bangladesh, The Gambia has filed an application at the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”). The Gambia allege Myanmar is violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“Genocide Convention”), to which it signed in 1957. There is a growing push amongst the international community to hold Myanmar’s military leaders to account. Why is this being led by the smallest country in continental mainland Africa? How can the ICJ help Myanmar? And why might the connection between The Gambia and Myanmar be a key factor in determining the ICJ’s jurisdiction? Continue reading
Talitha Ramphal
1. Introduction
Plastic marine litter is growing, negatively affecting ecosystems, biodiversity and human health globally, and luckily awareness of this issue has grown as well on the international stage. For example, the EU adopted the Single Use Plastic Directive, which states in its preamble that the ‘Union must play its part in preventing and tackling marine litter and aim to be a standard setter for the world’. With this Directive, the EU aims to achieve an ambitious and sustained reduction of single-use plastic products within its Member States. The private sector also pursues another way to tackle this issue, e.g., the Ocean Cleanup, which is a foundation registered in the Netherlands that develops technologies to clean up ocean plastic pollution.
Harsh Mahaseth
There has been a shift in how ASEAN has been functioning pre and post the ASEAN Charter. ASEAN was initially a political creature which mainly reached agreements through an informal process called the ASEAN Way. Continue reading
Aisha Binte Abdur Rob \ aisha.rob@bracu.ac.bd
There is increasing recognition of the human costs of climate change as cumulating evidence is solidifying the links between, for instance, rising global temperatures and destroyed livelihoods. The adverse impacts on health, food, housing and other fundamental human needs are now manifest. Continue reading
Dr Douglas Guilfoyle | douglas.guilfoyle@adfa.edu.au
On three occasions the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has sought to bring proceedings against heads of State or government, these being the situations inCôte D’Ivoire, Kenya and Darfur, Sudan. None have thus far met with much success. The (now former) President of Sudan, Mr Al Bashir, has been ruled to have no immunity from the Court’s processes but is not in custody after more than 10 years. The case against President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya collapsed in 2014. Continue reading
Sarthak Raizada | sarthakraizada22@gmail.com
In retaliation to India’s decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, Pakistan has made several attempts to internationalize the Kashmir dispute over the past two months. Continue reading
Prof. Panos Merkouris | p.merkouris@rug.nl
In international law, interpretation is ubiquitous and is the process through which the interpreter attempts to determine the meaning of the rule that is being interpreted. Every case brought before international courts and tribunals raises questions of interpretation. For written agreements between States, this process has been codified in Articles 31-33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). Based on these articles, some of the elements that are taken into consideration are the text, the context of the treaty, and its object and purpose as evidence of the intention of the parties. However, a key issue is that these VCLT articles refer only to interpretation of treaties and not of customary international law (CIL).
Continue reading
Arun Chauhan | archauhan9984@gmail.com
The final National Register of Citizens (NRC) list, which establishes the individual statuses of more than 30 million applicants, was released online on 31 August 2019. Amnesty International in its report has noted that over 1.9 million people were omitted from the final list, pushing them to the brink of statelessness. Inarguably, this is going to make India witness one of the country’s largest upheavals of people and the worst humanitarian crisis unfolding in Assam. Previously, the Supreme Court of India extended the deadline for the final publication of the Assam National Registry of Citizens due to allegedly wrongful inclusions and exclusions. The other demands of Centre and Assam, such as a 20 percent sample verification of NRC to find out the discrepancies over inclusions, was rejected by the Apex Court.
