On February 4, 2021, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its judgment on preliminary objections concerning Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Qatar v. United Arab Emirates). By eleven to six votes, the ICJ upheld the objection to the Court's jurisdiction raised by the United Arab Emirates, finding that it does not have jurisdiction to hear the application filed by Qatar in June 2018. As explained in a press release from the Court, Qatar launched proceedings against the United Arab Emirates, alleging...
International Law in Brief
International Law in Brief (ILIB) is a forum that provides updates on current developments in international law from the editors of ASIL's International Legal Materials.
On February 4, 2021, a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Dominic Ongwen guilty of 61 crimes against humanity and war crimes. As a press release from the Court explains, the conviction is in relation to acts committed in Northern Uganda between July 2002 and December 2005. Specifically, the "crimes were committed in the context of the armed rebellion of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) against the government of Uganda" due to a perception on the part of the LRA that the citizens of Northern Uganda were aligned with the government. Ongwen was found to bear full...
On February 3, 2021, Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, announced a five-year extension of the New START Treaty (Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms) with Russia. According to the U.S. Department of State, the Treaty, which originally entered into force in 2011, "enhances U.S. national security by placing verifiable limits on all Russian deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons." It imposes aggregate limits on both the U.S. and Russia concerning intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and...
On February 3, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its unanimous judgment in Federal Republic of Germany et al. v. Philipp et al. The case concerned the rightful ownership of a collection of medieval relic known as the Welfenschatz. The respondents in the case are the heirs of German Jewish art collectors and claim that the Nazi government coerced their art collector relatives into selling the collection to Prussia for much less than its value. The heirs brought several property law-based claims in the U.S. courts against Germany, which argued that it was immune from suit...
Toward the end of 2020, the cour administrative d'appel de Bordeaux (administrative court of appeals in Bordeaux) issued a judgment on an asylum claim that substantively took environmental pollution into account when making its determination that the asylum seeker could not be returned to Bangladesh because of medical conditions exacerbated by the air quality there. The judgment is currently only available in French, but a helpful commentary has been provided by the UK Human Rights blog. According to that piece, the asylum seeker is a Bangladeshi national, suffering from severe respiratory...
On January 28, 2021, a Special Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) held that it has jurisdiction over the boundary dispute between Mauritius and Maldives. The judgment was in response to five preliminary objections raised by Maldives, arguing that the Special Chamber did not have jurisdiction over the matter. First, Maldives argued that the United Kingdom is an "indispensable third party" to the dispute because of its sovereign claim over the Chagos Archipelago and that, in its absence, jurisdiction over the dispute is improper. Relatedly, Maldives...
On Friday, January 29, 2021, a group of Diplomatic Missions in Myanmar, including Australia, Canada, the United States, and a number of European Union Member States, issued a joint statement in support of "Myanmar's democratic transition and efforts to promote peace, human rights, and development in the country." The statement expressed optimism surrounding the upcoming Parliamentary session and its elections on February 1 and "congratulate[s] the people of Myanmar on their historic participation in the country's recent general election," which took place on November 8, 2020. The statement...
On January 24, 2021, the Central African Republic (CAR) surrendered Mahamat Said Abdel Kani to the International Criminal Court (ICC), who is suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the CAR capital of Bangui. Mr. Said had an arrest warrant issued against him by the ICC in January 2019, after a Pre-Trial Chamber II finding that "there were reasonable grounds to believe that an armed conflict not of an international character was ongoing on the territory of the CAR"; that "from at least March 2013 until at least January 2014, a widespread and systematic attack was...
The U.S. Department of State has published the text of three agreements which entered into force at the end of 2020. The Agreement Concerning Distributed Ocean Sensing between the U.S. Department of Defense and the NATO Science and Technology Organization Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation entered into force on October 21, 2020. It has three objectives relating to the development of oceanographic sensing and analytical equipment and the sharing of information of oceanographic data.
The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Poland entered into force on November 13...
The first joint law report of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been published. The 107-page report covers 2019 and is the product of the three courts' "solid judicial dialogue" on human rights. The report presents a selection of the leading decisions of each court from that year, some of which, according to the report's introduction (signed by each of the courts' respective presidents), "illustrate how the courts are increasingly having regard to each other’s approach to human rights protection...