international law

Guest Contributor Kate Mackintosh: 200 Words to Save the Planet—The Crime of Ecocide

Photo of Permanent Premises of the International Criminal Court

Could ecocide become the fifth crime to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court?

Last month, a panel of international lawyers chaired by Philippe Sands and Dior Fall Sow launched our proposal for a new crime of ‘ecocide’ – an international crime of environmental destruction that would sit alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression at the International Criminal Court. The idea of ecocide …

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Who’s WHO?

Trump cut off funding to the WHO. What’s that? And also, why?

Most people probably hadn’t heard of the WHO until Trump announced he was cutting off funding.  Here’s what you should know about the organization and Trump’s complaints about it. The Organization. The World Health Organization, an agency of the UN, was established by a 1946 agreement, which went into effect two years later. It has …

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Weaponizing Water in Kashmir

India’s legal moves on water put Pakistan on edge

A month after India’s move to exert more direct control over Jammu & Kashmir, the Indian state that occupies part of the larger Kashmir region, the country is also now in a position to exert control – in both illegal and legal ways – over important river waters that Pakistan relies upon to sustain people …

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A Big Step for the Montreal Protocol

Parties to the Montreal Protocol will hold their 25th meeting next week in Bangkok.  In addition to all their normal business related to the continuing phasedown of ozone-depleting substances (ODS), parties at this meeting will consider a huge step, in the form of proposals to amend the Protocol to phase down Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).  Proponents of …

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Surprise! Words don’t save biodiversity

The Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted in 1992 and entered into force in 1993 amid much fanfare. It’s been a rousing success in attracting adherents; it currently has 193 parties, with the only major outlier being the United States, which has some of the strongest conservation laws in the world. But a new report …

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Climate Change and International Human Rights Law

A report released today by the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and the Center for Law & Global Justice at the University of San Francisco School of Law finds that climate change policies may unintentionally increase …

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