Articles

Vladimir Osechkin is a Russian-born human rights activist and founder of Gulagu.net, an NGO that documents and exposes crimes committed by Russian officials and the FSB. In November 2021, Osechkin was placed on a wanted list by the Russian state after leaking a large archive of documents, photos, and videos with hundreds of cases of rape and torture of inmates in Russian prisons directed by prison officials. Since August 2022, Osechkin has urged former Russian soldiers and di

Peter Krausz was born in Romania in 1946. He studied mural painting from 1964 to 1969 at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts. Since 1970, he has made Montreal his home. His diverse artistic production includes painting, drawing, installation, and photography. From 1980 to 1990, he was the curator of the Saidye Bronfman Centre Art Gallery and a teacher at Concordia University. In 1991, he joined the faculty at the University of Montreal where he is now a tenured Professor of

This time, it feels like it is finally happening—until Abu Salah comes home with the dreaded news: ‘Wait another two days until the strong winds die down’. Roliana cannot understand. ‘Daddy, why don’t we just take the airplane?’ she asks.[1] I. Introduction Seeking safety and entry into the territory of a state to initiate an asylum procedure, is often a life-risking and traumatising endeavour. Yet, thus far, the state parties to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Stat

‘Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph’. Haile Selassie, United Nations General Assembly, 4 October 1963.[1] Introduction The continuing suffering of the Sudanese people illustrates the futility of international policy-making in the absence of the political will necessary to enfor

François Zimeray is a prominent French diplomat, lawyer, former politician, and human rights activist. Zimeray previously served as France’s Ambassador-at-Large for Human Rights. He later became the French Ambassador for the Kingdom of Denmark in 2013. This interview was conducted on 14 September 2023. CJLPA: Welcome, Mr François Zimeray. We would like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art.

If you tolerate this, your children will be next! Manic Street Preachers, 1998 Introduction The issue of immigration and human rights law, or more precisely, the human rights of people on the move, has become one of the most urgent challenges for many Western societies. Syrian refugees walking across Europe in 2015 almost faded away in the collective memory. They were replaced by the images of people clinging on the planes leaving Kabul, a mass exodus from Ukraine, people

The 2011 Western and Arab intervention in Libya was born of the lessons learned (or, as the case may be, not learned) from the international community’s previous two decades of responding to the outbreak of conflict and commission of gross violations of human rights in various contexts. More precisely, the Libyan case was informed by the international community’s previous failure to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda and to halt what had been up to that point the largest ma

Luis Moreno Ocampo is an Argentine Lawyer and prosecutor who played a critical role in the Trial of the Juntas during Argentina’s democratic transition and later went on to serve as the first prosecutor at the International Criminal Court from 2003-2012. He is now a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.

International law faces two profound issues. Each involves Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations prohibiting the use of force by one Member State against another. Both concern the roles of the Security Council and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). One—Ukraine and the Russian Federation (Russia)—is whether the armed entry into Ukraine on 24 April 2022 and since of Russia as a great power is immune from the rule of law. The other—Gaza/Palestine and Israel—c

This article explores an uncomfortable reality that locates international humanitarian and development organisations as sometimes unwitting, sometimes witting facilitators of the state crime of genocide and in doing so reveals the stark and sometimes lethal contradictions inherent in the overarching organisational goals and principles to which these organisations adhere. Our focus is on the Burmese/Myanmar Rohingya genocide, and the immediate pressures, moral dilemmas, and in

In January 2018, veteran actress Caroline Lagerfelt stepped into the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She was there to see ‘Ode to the Sea’, an exhibition of artwork by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which at that point had been open for 16 years, with no end in sight. Lagerfelt had known about the atrocities committed at Guantanamo for some time. In fact, she had played British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce in a play about Guantanamo 14 years earlie

Eric Emeraux is the former Head of the Central Office for Combating Core International Crimes and Hate Crimes (OCLCH), France’s war crimes unit. Prior to that, Emeraux spent five years in Sarajevo as internal security attaché at the French Embassy. His book Hunting Monsters, published in 2023 in the UK, recounts the considerable work achieved with his team to track down war criminals and put an end to impunity. This written interview was conducted in December 2023. CJLPA: D

Mazen Darwish is a Syrian Human Rights lawyer, freedom of expression activist and the president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression. He was arrested in 2012 by the intelligence forces in Syria along with fifteen other journalists, one of whom was his wife Yara Bader. During his imprisonment he was subject to a forced disappearance and his whereabouts were unknown. Following his release and escape from Syria, Mazen has continued to advocate for freedom of

KV Duong was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 1980. He emigrated to Toronto, Canada with his family in 1987 and moved to London, UK on his own in 2010. His art practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and live performance. In 2022, KV had a solo exhibition titled ‘Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here’ at the Migration Museum in London, followed by ‘No Place Like Home’ at the Museum of the Home in 2023, a group exhibition of eight artists from the Vietnames

Over his career, Kevin Macdonald has directed a plethora of documentaries and films which have garnered critical acclaim and popular success. Not one to shy away from sensitive and complex subject matter, Kevin’s work depicts unsanitised, thought-provoking stories, from a documentary on antisemitism to a film on a prisoner in Guantanamo. For the former, Kevin was awarded an Academy Award for Best Documentary feature. His latest film, The Mauritanian, explores the real story o

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York. Tschabalala is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self's work seek to expand her critical in

Rami Jarrah is a Syrian political activist who played a major role in exposing the Syrian regime’s war crimes during the 2011 Syrian Revolution. During a time when international journalists were not allowed in Syria, Rami operated under the alias of ‘Alexander Page’, where he would document the war crimes committed by the Syrian government and share them on social media and to news outlets around the world. His bravery and fearlessness played a major role in exposing the trut

1. The Obligation to Undress and the Destruction of Personal Property: Related Violations 1.1. Evidence of Confiscation and Destruction of Migrants’ Personal Belongings Denounced by International Organisations, Bodies, and Non-Governmental Organisations The requirements for migrants to undress and the destruction of their personal belongings—including documents and mobile phones—by border guards and Frontex [the European Border and Coast Guard Agency] agents, at both inte