Author’s Note: This piece provides updates to the October 31, 2023 article “Israel claims it is no longer occupying the Gaza Strip. What does international law say?” as well as the February 16, 2024 article “Could the US and other states be implicated in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel?” On July 19, the International
On August 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy submitted a bill to the Ukrainian parliament on ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which would make Ukraine an ICC member state. Parliament duly ratified the bill on August 21, and President Zelenskyy signed it into law on August 24. This is a
The numbers don’t lie. Two years after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the humanitarian and economic costs to Ukraine have been immense. But the war has also wreaked devastating self-inflicted wounds on Russia, including catastrophic casualty rates, growing economic isolation from the West, and the mass
On Friday the world’s eyes were on The Hague, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its ruling on provisional measures in the case South Africa brought against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention. The court granted some of the orders South Africa requested against Israel, but most notably declined to order Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in Gaza. Instead, the
On November 16, international human rights law firm Global Rights Compliance (GRC) released a report alleging that, months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces engaged in a “highly coordinated level of pre-planning” to weaponize Ukrainian grain. The new evidence suggests that these preparations—including the procurement of trucks and cargo ships to carry
On July 17, Russia announced that it had withdrawn from the Black Sea Grain Initiative (“the Initiative”), a deal brokered in 2022 by the United Nations (UN) and Turkey that allowed Ukraine to safely export grain through the Black Sea. Since then, Russian drones have destroyed grain warehouses on Ukraine’s Danube River ports and Russia
