Dominic Ongwen at the ICC In 2015 I dedicated a blog post to the cultural defence where I felt that cultural defences could likely fit into and within the framework of existing defences at the International Criminal Court. (see The Realities of a Cultural Defence at the ICC?) I used the Ongwen case as a point of departure at a time when Ongwen was newly arrested and transferred to the ICC. In the aforementioned blog post which highlighted portions of my newly fledged research and which over time evolved into my existing research, I argued that the defences of mental illness as ..read more

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This blogpost serves as a summary of my LL.M thesis which concerns the problematic coexistence of Islamic Law with Greek Civil Law regarding the protection of the Muslim minority in Western Thrace in Greece. The aim of this post is to emphasise the importance of the conceptual understanding when confronting legal issues that entail a different set of values and political complicacies. The coexistence of two or multiple legal regimes within a country can raise several legal issues. For instance, the co-presence of Greece’s civil law with Sharia underlines precisely the judicial controversy and ..read more

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Sudanese Protesters During 2019 Protests Sudan is one of the largest and diverse countries in Africa. It has also witnessed the longest civil war on the continent. Ever since 1989, it has been synonymous and has come to be known as a country suffering from violence and grave human rights violations including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.  From this period it has also been governed by the most notorious Islamist political party, which has essentially relied on the principle of divide and rule. As a result, millions of innocent people have either been killed or ..read more

Over the last couple of years, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been criticised as biased, selective, and has been queried about its targeting of only weaker States, such as African States. The purpose of this blog is to address the question viz. what are some of the current problems or tensions underlying the failure of states parties to cooperate with the ICC in good faith as enunciated and expected under the Rome Statute? This blog piece starts by assessing the reasons behind the failure or the unwillingness of some States parties to cooperate with the Court as stipulated in ..read more

The purpose of this blog post is to assess the probability of a compromise in the case of Al Bashir in light of articles 16, 65 and 53 of the Rome Statute. Despite the prominent developments in the field of international criminal law, the failure to prevent such serious crimes such as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity remains salient. The reason behinds this failure is the fact that the deterring effects remain hardly unseen and the response of international criminal justice to these atrocities has not been not comprehensive. Primarily, Al Bashir's case is a legal one, and it ..read more