Please consider submitting your work or nominating someone else’s work for the WILIG Scholarship Prize by June 15, 2022. The WILIG Scholarship Prize, awarded every other year, highlights and promotes excellence in international law scholarship involving women and girls, gender, and feminist approaches. It recognizes innovative contributions to international law scholarship that theorize or utilize a feminist lens or lenses, highlight and seek to address topics disproportionately affecting women and girls, or consider the impact of international law or policy on gender more broadly. The first WILIG Scholarship Prize was awarded in 2021 to Irini Papanicolopulu, for Gender and the Law of the Sea (Brill Nijhoff, 2019).

The WILIG Scholarship Prize Committee for 2022-2023, is composed of WILIG Co-Chair Yvonne Dutton (Indiana – McKinney School of Law), Laurence Boisson de Chazournes (University of Geneva), MJ Durkee (Georgia), Chiara Giorgetti (Richmond), Alexandra Huneeus (Wisconsin). The Committee may award up to two prizes: one for book length monographs or edited volumes, and the other for individual articles or book chapters. Nominators may only nominate one book or article per cycle, and it must have been published in the last three years. Self-nominations are welcome. Please note that only members of ASIL/WILIG are eligible to receive the prize.

To submit an article, chapter, or book published in the last three years for consideration, please send the relevant scholarly work, along with a cover letter describing why the work merits the award in light of the criteria above, to wilig@asil.org by June 15. The prize will be awarded at ASIL’s 2023 Annual Meeting.

On October 1, 2020, three women with deep connections to IntLawGrrls, Professors Diane Marie Amann (founder), Milena Sterio (editor), and Meg deGuzman (contributor), filed suit against the Trump Administration, challenging the legality of Executive Order 13,928 and its implementing regulations. Foley Hoag, LLP represents the plaintiffs, which also include Professor Gabor Rona and Open Society Justice Initiative. The complaint, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges the Executive Order and implementing regulations violate Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, are ultra vires under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and violate the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

In essence, Trump’s Executive Order empowers Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in coordination with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Attorney General William Barr, to designate and freeze the assets of “foreign persons” who have engaged in International Criminal Court efforts to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute US personnel without US consent, or personnel of US allies without their consent, or who have “materially assisted” such persons or activities.  According to the complaint, those who interact in a prohibited manner with designated persons are themselves subject to designation, as well as to civil and criminal penalties under the IEEPA. 

The ICC is by no means a perfect institution, and many have raised legitimate concerns about its judges, procedures, and choices since its establishment, including multiple US administrations. Yet, as others have already explained, Trump’s order is deeply problematic on its merits for myriad reasons. (See previous IntLawGrrls and Opinio Juris posts.)  It is also consistent with the Trump Administration’s anti-pluralist and anti-institutionalist populist approach to international courts and tribunals. (See my forthcoming piece in the Maryland Journal of International Law.)  What the complaint now adds, is a clear demonstration of the Executive Order’s chilling effect on public debate about the ICC and critical engagement with its work, as well as its hindering of efforts to improve both the court and the quality of international justice. 

Following designation of ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another high- level court official, Plaintiffs allege they reconsidered or abandoned activities like participating in initiatives to improve the ICC’s functioning, training civil society and victims’ rights groups on effective engagement with the Office of the Prosecutor and the ICC, providing advice to the Prosecutor on issues relevant to children and armed conflict, submitting amicus curiae briefs in cases involving alleged atrocities around the world, and attending conferences bringing together scholars and professionals on topics involving international justice and the ICC.  Further, their concerns about potential civil and criminal liability have kept them from signing statements critical of the US Administration’s stance toward the ICC, as well as writing or publicly commenting on the ICC’s work. Plaintiffs argue this chilling effect, on a remarkably broad range of activities, violates their First Amendment rights to free speech.

It is the Executive Order and implementing regulations’ ambiguities that are at fault. What does it mean to “materially assist” a designated person? Is providing advice about whether the detention and mistreatment of children during the war in Afghanistan constitutes a crime against humanity a violation of the Order? What about filing an amicus brief in a case involving a US ally? Is participating in a process to strengthen the technical capacity of the Office of the Prosecutor, or working with victims’ groups a violation of the Order?  And what exactly is a “foreign person”? Does it include dual nationals? Without further clarification, Plaintiffs – and the rest of us – are left in the dark about possible designation and subjection to civil and criminal penalties. They also result, Plaintiffs allege, in no notice as to what conduct is covered, permitting potentially arbitrary enforcement of the Executive Order, in violation of their Due Process rights under the Fifth Amendment.  

As remedies, Plaintiffs seek declaratory relief that the Executive Order and regulations violate the First and Fifth Amendments, are ultra vires to the IEEPA and violate the APA. They request preliminary and permanent injunctions prohibiting Defendants from designating them under the Executive Order or regulations, or enforcing the IEEPA’s civil and criminal penalties against them.

As IntLawGrrls readers undoubtedly know, this is not the first time that the Trump Administration has sought to undermine an international adjudicative body, rather than engaging in meaningful and substantive reform efforts.  Others include boycotting sessions of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, threats to defund it, and failing to support its own candidate for election,[1] as well as continuous blocking of appointment to the WTO Appellate Body’s Dispute Settlement Body Appellate Body, risking its collapse.[2]  What distinguishes this particular action is its chilling effect on free debate and discussion, through the possible use of civil and criminal penalties against academics, advocates, and non-governmental organizations.

We should all pay attention to what happens next.

 

A little over ten years ago, this blog was founded to give women scholars, lawyers, policymakers and others a voice on issues related to international law, policy and practice. The idea was, in part, to counteract the argument that “there are no women” out there with relevant expertise on a particular international law topic, through a page listing women by their expertise. (By the way, if you’d like to update your expertise, you can email intlawgrrls@gmail.com  with “Expertise Update” in the subject line.)

Although progress has been made, the “manel,” and surprisingly, even the all-male or almost all-male conference, continue to live on.  See this conference taking place this week at McGeorge Law School on the fascinating topic of Russian interference in the 2016 election.  Nine men and zero women will be speaking, according to the website.

It is hard to believe that only men have something to say about this topic, which dominates the news cycle on a daily basis. If the organizers are looking to diversify, there are plenty of women they could contact with expertise in public international law, national security law, election law, and Russia.  A quick look at the IntLawGrrls, LawFare, Opinio Juris, and the JustSecurity blogs is enough to find numerous women with relevant expertise.  They could also check out a few law schools’ faculty profiles (e.g., nearby Stanford) and places like the Wilson Center.

The reason to eliminate “manels” is not that men and women bring different perspectives to Russian interference in the 2016 election, which is an open question. Rather, the point is that these events give participants a chance to share scholarship and contribute to cutting edge debates in real time. They result in greater prestige and name recognition for the participants. They grow networks and open doors for future collaboration and job opportunities.  And, the presence of both sexes shows students and others in the audience that women also have something to say about these issues.

So what do we do about it? Marty Lederman recently called out a conference at the University of San Diego for having 14 men and one woman, on Twitter: “We academics (present company included) should stop treating this as acceptable/unremarkable.”  UC Irvine Professor and UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression David Kaye ends his emails with a signature block that includes, “& I don’t sit on manels.”  Their voices and their commitments are noteworthy and important.   In Geneva, numerous chiefs of international organizations have pledged not to sit on panels without gender parity or to ask about gender parity before accepting an invitation, through the Geneva Gender Champions Initiative.  In 2016, Champions intervened 42% of the time to request a change in the gender balance of a panel, resulting in changes 84% of the time.

Maybe it’s time we all had some hard conversations with our colleagues and asked them to refrain from sitting on such panels or attending such conferences going forward.  Maybe we should stop forwarding announcements for conferences and panels with no women involved.  Or maybe we should start featuring “manels” on IntLawGrrls. Thoughts?

 

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March 1, 2018

The McGeorge Global Law Center asked me to put their comment into the blog, so that people could read it without having to scroll through the comments. I am reproducing it here, with some of my own thoughts below:

“We are organizing the conference and thank you for raising an important concern. Please understand that as of Thursday, February 22, when the announcement went out, we had invited more than ten women to speak at the conference. However, only one accepted the invitation, and she unfortunately had to withdraw for personal reasons. While we were distressed at failing to secure women speakers, we thought it necessary to publicize the conference at that time given that it was but a week away. We are nevertheless continuing to look for women speakers. We have since approached an additional number of women, and while almost all of them have conflicts, we believe that one invitee will be able to participate and are working with her to accommodate her schedule. We would also note that our resident election law expert, Dean Mary-Beth Moylan, has always been scheduled to moderate the election law panel. (The announcement only listed speakers and not the moderators or organizers.)
We are very troubled that people would assume we had not considered inviting women speakers, and wish to take the opportunity to clarify the record. We hope you will consider acknowledging the same in the text of your blog post as readers may not scroll down to read all the comments that follow.
With thanks, McGeorge Global Center”

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I appreciate very much that McGeorge responded to this blog post and felt that it was important to clarify what their process was, and that they did, indeed, seek to include women. I wonder whether this was a fluke or whether it is a common phenomenon to invite 10 women and get only one who is available to participate (who unfortunately, dropped out in this particular case). Have others had similar experiences? Do men accept invitations to speak more frequently than women? If so, what explains that phenomenon?

I am also heartened that others have commented to this post or reached out to say that they are thinking about ways to ensure that women are included, like by asking organizers whether both sexes are present on the panel or at a conference.  Another question this exchange has raised is, what happens if you did reach out to women, and none were available? What responsibilities, if any, do the organizers have in such a situation? What can they do to send the message to their students and conference attendees, or to the broader community, that the participation of women is important to them?

I hope we can continue to have this dialogue in an open and respectful way, whether on, or off-line.

 

Washington, DC, ASIL Annual Meeting – March 30-April 2, 2016

 The International Courts and Tribunals Interest Groups of the American and European Societies of International Law are delighted to announce that their second joint meeting will take place in Washington, DC, during ASIL’s Annual Meeting. The exact date and time will be determined several weeks in advance of the Annual Meeting.  Three members of the interest groups will be given the opportunity to present works-in-progress and receive feedback.

Call for papers 

The works-in-progress session is dedicated to original and on-going research on the theme of “Regional Approaches to International Adjudication.” Members of either interest group, at any level of their careers, are invited to submit abstracts describing unpublished works on this topic. Relevant topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

 

• To what extent do regional approaches to international adjudication exist? What characterizes these approaches?
• How and why might different geographical regions differ in their commitment to international adjudication as a method of dispute resolution, and in their willingness to submit to the jurisdiction of international courts? What is the significance of these differences for legitimacy and effectiveness?
• How and why might courts with similar subject matter jurisdiction differ in the development of procedures and substantive law? What is the significance of these differences for legitimacy and effectiveness?
• To what extent is dialogue among regional courts affecting adjudication or practices in these courts?
• To what extent do regional courts interact with international courts, and strive to follow their jurisprudence and coordinate their respective exercise of jurisdiction?

 

Three papers will be selected on the basis of the submitted abstracts. Abstracts must not exceed 500 words, and must be submitted to the following email addresses: geir.ulfstein@jus.uio.no and ngrossman@ubalt.edu.  In addition to the abstract, each submission should contain:

 

• The author’s name and affiliation
• A short author’s CV
• Whether the author is an ESIL ICTIG member or an ASIL ICTIG member or both.

The deadline for the submission of the abstracts is February 1, 2016. Authors of selected papers will be notified by February 15, 2016. Authors of selected papers are requested to submit drafts of their works-in-progress by March 15, 2016.

You may have heard about the launch of the Gqual campaign to increase gender parity on international law bodies including international courts and tribunals, taking place at the UN on September 17. Here’s a link to the Facebook page if you’d like more information: https://www.facebook.com/GqualCampaign. The point of the campaign is to get states to nominate and vote for more women for these important positions. The campaign is timely and significant because women continue to lag far behind men in decision-making positions on these bodies. Did you know only one woman is serving on the 7 member benches of the WTO Appellate Body, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights? And only one woman sits on the 21-member bench of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea? She also happens to be the only woman ever to serve on that court, in almost two decades.

I’ve just written a paper documenting the paucity of women judges on twelve international courts and tribunals in mid-2015 and historically, explaining why there are so few women being elected and proposing solutions. It’s forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law. If you’d like a preview, please download it at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2472054.  The article argues, in part, that a limited pool of qualified women is an unpersuasive explanation for the paucity of women on international court benches.   Proponents of this view argue that women are found in lower numbers in the highest echelons of the legal profession domestically, and therefore, it’s not surprising that they serve in low numbers on prestigious international court benches.

But if the limited pool argument is right, wouldn’t we expect the pool to grow over time, as more women join the legal profession and advance within its ranks? Yet eight of the twelve courts surveyed had fewer women on the bench in mid-2015 than in previous years. Also, states with higher percentages of women lawyers would appoint them in greater numbers than states with fewer women lawyers. The data, however, appears to point to a different conclusion.

It is estimated that half of France’s lawyers are women, yet it has never had a female permanent judge on the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia or Rwanda, the European Court of Justice, the Law of the Sea Tribunal, the International Court of Justice, or the European Court of Human Rights, although French men have served on all of them. (One French woman served as an ad litem judge for the ICTY.) About half of the UK’s lawyers are women, yet no British woman has ever served on the European Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, or the Yugoslav tribunal, although British men have. The UK did nominate Rosalynn Higgins, though, as the first woman ever to serve on the International Court of Justice, in 1995. (Only three more women have been elected to the 15-member ICJ bench in the intervening 20 years.) Although Russian women consist of about half of that country’s lawyers, no Russian woman has ever served on the five international courts where its men have served. On the other hand, China, where women are estimated to hold 20% of legal degrees, has successfully elected Chinese women to the International Court of Justice and the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body.

It’s also important to remember that there are not that many international judge positions out there. We are not talking about filling 10,000 judicial seats. On the twelve courts surveyed, there are 195 judicial slots available, and they turn over every few years, depending on the court. You don’t need a very large pool to fill these slots. And there must be more than one woman in a world of 7 billion people who is qualified to serve on ITLOS and the WTO’s Appellate Body, and in the entire populations of the states parties to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the ECOWAS Court.

Finally, there’s a problematic side effect to relying on the pool argument. The pool for international judges could itself be limited due to discrimination and exclusion at the domestic level. So using it to justify lower numbers of women at the international level simply replicates and exacerbates exclusion at the domestic one.

I hope you’ll check out Gqual in the days to come. It’s time for a change!

In case you will be in the Washington, D.C. area on Friday, April 24, from 3:30 to 5 pm, please consider coming to a panel on Best Practices in Judicial Selection Procedures for International Courts, at the American Society of International Law, 2223 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington DC 20008.

The panel, co-sponsored by the American Society of International Law’s International Courts and Tribunals Interest Group (ICTIG), the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), and the University of Baltimore School of Law, will explore and evaluate procedures developed by international courts and tribunals to select their members. Panelists will consider the impact of selection procedures on the merit, diversity, and independence of the judges selected. What steps can be taken to guarantee fair and transparent procedures? Do “best practices” exist in judicial selection across international courts? What hurdles exist to reforming existing selection procedures? How do selection procedures affect the legitimacy of these courts?

The panel will include former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and DC Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Wald, CEJIL Executive Director Viviana Krsticevic, and Ambassador of Mexico to the Organization of American States Emilio Rabasa Gamboa. University of Baltimore Professor Nienke Grossman (ICTIG co-chair) will moderate. The panel will be followed by a brief reception.

This panel will also be streamed live at http://www.asil.org/live. If you plan on attending in person, please help us to plan accordingly by registering at http://www.asil.org/event/best-practices-selection-international-judges.

I hope to see you there!

On September 18 and 19, 2014, the Center for International and Comparative Law at the University of Baltimore will celebrate its 20th anniversary. As part of the festivities, it will host a symposium on Legitimacy and International Courts, co-sponsored by the University of Oslo’s PluriCourts program. Speakers will discuss the legitimacy of specific international courts, such as the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and the Inter-American and European Courts of Human Rights, as well as cross-cutting issues such as legitimacy and effectiveness, and legitimacy and democracy. The point of the conference and the book to follow is to think comprehensively and comparatively about the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals. What can we learn from the experiences of specific courts and to what extent are lessons from one court generalizable to other courts?

The event is free and open to the public. The program is available at: http://law.ubalt.edu/centers/cicl/ciclevents/Conference%20Schedule.pdf and includes a number of Intlawgrrls contributors as panelists. Please RSVP at http://www.ubalt.edu/calendar/EventDetail.cfm?eventId=12964&daterequest=9/18/2014.