Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We ask listeners to support us with a small monthly donation via Patreon or PayPal.

Photo: Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons

The interventions illuminate the legal issues the court will be facing at trial. One key issue is what constitutes the mens rea, or the mental threshold, of the crime of genocide. According to Namibia, the court may infer the required genocidal intent based on the scale, systematic nature, intensity, duration, and repetition of acts listed in Article II of the Genocide Convention. It is also Namibia’s contention that other acts, such as forced displacement, starvation of civilians, and repeated killing of children, are relevant, if not compelling evidence, in determination of the required genocidal intent.

On the other hand, Hungary, Fiji and the US asked the court to maintain a high threshold in inferring genocidal intent from a “pattern of conduct.” They contended that the court may only rely on such criteria when the pattern of conduct is so unambiguous that genocidal intent is the “only reasonable inference.” Hungary argued that the Genocide Convention drafters intended a narrow scope for the crime of genocide, such that its exceptional gravity is distinguished from other internationally wrongful acts and breaches of international humanitarian law. Hungary warned that any attempt to broaden the scope of criteria for genocide risks blurring that boundary and opening the floodgates to politicized litigation.

Apart from the mental element, Namibia argued that the crime of genocide can be committed by either action or omission, including failing to provide life-sustaining necessities or withholding humanitarian assistance.

Fiji stressed the context of urban warfare. The nation called on the court to consider the deliberate use of civilian infrastructure by combatants  to maximize civilian casualties when the other party takes military actions. Fiji warned that if the court decides to include such military actions in the crime of genocide, this could expose states to genocide charges when they participate in peacekeeping missions, criminalizing actions that would be legitimate but for a terrorist organization’s strategy of using civilians as shields.

Fiji also urged the court not to allocate special probative status to UN reports, arguing that these reports rely on secondary sources that are not necessarily accurate and are not disinterested witnesses. In September 2025, an independent UN commission concluded that the Israeli forces have committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Earlier this week, the Netherlands and Iceland also filed declarations of intervention. The Netherlands called upon the court to lower the threshold for “serious bodily or mental harm” when the victim is a child. Iceland warned that the “only reasonable inference” standard should not render inferring genocidal intent effectively impossible.

The court has invited South Africa and Israel to file written observations following these submissions.

From JURIST, March 14. Used with permission. Internal links added.

See our last reports on the ICJ case and genocide accusations against Israel.

Photo: ICJ

The court concluded that the government has violated the right to private and family life of the residents of Bonaire under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).

In regard to mitigation, the court found that while the Dutch Climate Act sets a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, neither the act nor its 2023 amendment set intermediate emissions-reduction targets. Both parties agreed that there was less than a 5% likelihood that the Netherlands could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 43% compared to 2019 by 2030. Given the failure to quantify its remaining emission allowance, the court concluded that the Netherlands’ mitigation measures do not satisfy its convention and treaty obligations.

The court also noted the lack of a climate adaptation plan, sufficient scientific research, and adequate financial resources for Bonaire. These inadequacies persist despite the government’s acknowledgment that Bonaire is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

In addition, the ruling found that the government did not provide sufficient procedural safeguards to Bonaire residents, including access to information and public participation.

The recent advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice significantly influenced the Dutch court in determining the state’s obligations in regard to climate change. In its judgment, the Dutch court affirmed that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement are legally binding on the Netherlands, alongside other regional and international human rights treaties. These treaty obligations include the duty to contribute equitably to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Apart from the right to private and family life, the court also held that the lack of adaptation measures for Bonaire, contrasting comparable measures already in place for the European Netherlands, amounted to discrimination against residents of Bonaire. This, the court found, violates Article 14 of the ECHR and Article 1 of Protocol No. 12 to the Convention. According to Greenpeace, this ruling marks the first time that a court has recognized a state’s failure to develop climate policies for a municipality as discrimination.

Greenpeace brought the class action on behalf of approximately 26,000 residents on Bonaire. Responding to the ruling, Marieke Vellekoop, director of Greenpeace Netherlands, said that incoming prime minister Rob Jetten must now allocate funding for the mandated climate measures on Bonaire.

From JURIST, Jan. 29. Used with permission.

See our last reports on Bonaire, the UN climate process, and climate change litigation.

See also our podcast on the World Court advisory opinion.

Photo: Dialogue Earth

Backed by Interpol, the European Union through EL PACCTO 2.0, and a Dutch police unit specializing in environmental crime, “Operation Guyana Shield” involved over 24,500 checks on people and vehicles across remote border areas, and resulted in 198 arrests. Officers seized large quantities of cash, unprocessed gold, and mercury, as well as firearms, drugs and mining equipment. Authorities said organized crime networks behind these operations are linked to a major Guyanese gold exporting firm. The operation signals a new enforcement posture, marked by deeper cross-border collaboration to disrupt transnational networks that evade jurisdictional boundaries and exploit enforcement gaps across the Amazon border region.

“The surge in international gold prices in recent years has resulted in increased gold mining, making it the fastest-growing revenue stream for organized crime groups,” Interpol Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza said. Commenting on the collaborative nature of the operation, he continued: “At Interpol, we are committed to working with our partners to disrupt those networks and prevent more damage to this remote and environmentally fragile region.”

Authorities also seized over $60,000 worth of cylinders of mercury, which is commonly used in illegal gold mining to separate gold ore. It is extremely toxic and harmful to both the environment and human health, and can have devastating consequences for both when improperly transported and stored. Officers working on the border between Brazil and Guyana also intercepted a bus carrying undocumented migrants, including minors, who they believe to have been exploited for child labor or sexual abuse.

The Operation Guyana Shield task force was based out of Brazil’s International Police Cooperation Center (CCPI) for Amazonia in Manaus, and was comprised of officials from all four participating jurisdictions. The operation represented a single, coordinated push to disrupt organized crime networks in the Guyana Shield region, which is routinely plagued by illegal gold mining, cross-border smuggling, and related crimes that exploit remote borders and weak or uneven enforcement capacities.

With enforcement actions increasingly shaped by shared intelligence and coordinated deployments, officials framed Operation Guyana Shield as a test case for sustained regional cooperation against organized crime.

From JURIST, Jan. 23. Used with permission.

Photo: IBAMA via Flickr

But the freed Belarusian prisoners are protesting that they were expelled to Lithuania in the US-brokered deal and not given the choice to remain in their own country. Additionally, many have noted that they were almost due to be freed anyway. Veteran dissident and one-time Belarusian presidential candidate Mikola Statkevich, released from prison on Sept. 11 as part of the deal, has been returned to a penal colony at Hlybokaye after refusing to accept exile to Lithuania. (The Guardian, The Insider)

The military maneuvers follow an alarming rise in brinkmanship on NATO’s eastern flank.

Poland requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty—mandating urgent talks among alliance members—after an incursion of at least 19 Russian drones into the country’s airspace on Sept. 10. The drones were intercepted by Polish and Dutch fighter jets, but not before a private home was struck and damaged in Lublin province. Russia denied targeting Poland, while Belarus, where some of the drones entered from, said they had “lost their course” because they were jammed. Poland is calling for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over its territory. (AP, CNN, Politico, TVP World)

“Russia’s war is escalating, not ending,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters in Brussels after the drone incursion. “What Putin wants to do is to test us. What happened in Poland is a game changer.” (AP)

Three days later, Romania scrambled two F-16 fighter jets after detecting a drone that had breached its airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine. The jets followed the drone until it returned to Ukrainian airspace. (France24)

This, in turn, followed new outbursts of Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.

Photo of Russian T-14 Armata tank via National Security Journal

The Ogoni Nine were a group of environmental activists who campaigned against Shell oil company and the Nigerian central government over the destructive impacts of oil production in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta. After brutally suppressing protests in the region, the government accused the Ogoni Nine of the murder of four pro-government Ogoni chiefs. The nine men, including the prominent writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, were convicted after what rights groups called an unfair trial and executed by hanging in 1995.

Isa Sanusi, director of Amnesty International Nigeria, welcomed the decision to pardon the activists but noted that much more needs to be done for the local communities, asserting that Shell’s activities in the region have left toxic pollution, affecting the health and livelihoods of many of the 30 million people living in the Niger Delta. According to Amnesty International, more than 13,500 Niger Delta residents have filed claims against Shell over the past decade.

Relatives of the Ogoni Nine have also accused Shell of complicity in the unlawful detention and execution of the activists. The family members took their case to the US and the Netherlands, but both courts held in favor of Shell.

Shell’s activities continue to cause severe environmental problems in the region. Last year, 40 Nigerian and international non-governmental organizations published a joint letter, charging that at least 17.5 million liters of oil leaked from Shell-related pipelines between 2011 and 2017. The letter also criticized Shell for using “legal gymnastics,” such as selling its subsidiaries, to escape responsibility for its wrongdoings.

The Niger Delta communities currently have ongoing claims against Shell in the UK.

From JURIST, June 15. Used with permission.

See our feature “Slippery Justice for Victims of Oil Spills: Nigerian Villagers Lose Lawsuit Against an Oil Giant”

Photo: 101LastTribes

But the conference, hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs & Combating Antisemitism, revealed a systemic alliance between Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionism and the neo-fascist right. Even Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt (whose organization faced criticism over its exoneration of Elon Musk’s Inauguration Day Nazi salute as an “awkward” gesture) and the increasingly Islamophobic French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy boycotted the event in protest of the prominent place given to far-right figures. To his credit, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis also cancelled.

Jordan Bardella, president of the French National Rally party, gave a keynote address at the confab, in which he blamed rising anti-Semitism in Europe on migration, and more specifically Muslim migration, saying: “Islamism is the totalitarianism of the 21st century.” This formulation (and especially use of the article “the”), of course, seeks to dismiss the threat still posed by the totalitarianism of the 20th century—fascism.

Panels had predictable names like “How Progressivism Fell Captive to Antisemitism” and “How Radical Islam Fuels Antisemitism in the West.”

Also on hand was Marion Maréchal, grand-daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Rally’s predecessor party the National Front—and a notorious Holocaust revisionist. This of course comes as Marine Le Pen, the old man’s daughter and (alarmingly) frontrunner in the 2027 French presidential race, has been barred from running upon her conviction on charges of embezzling EU funds for her campaign. (Yet another case of a European country taking pre-emptive legal action to prevent a far-right authoritarian from coming to power, which the United States so dramatically failed to do last year.) Unless she prevails on appeal, Bardella is likely to take her place as the National Rally candidate.

Also prominently featured was David Friedman, US ambassador to Israel during Trump’s first term. Asked by the moderator about Trump’s plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza, Friedman said: “I love it! I love it. And I think it’s doable.”

Other figures from the European far right attended from the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Hungary. Most telling was the appearance by Milorad Dodik, president of the Bosnian Serb Republic—just after a Bosnian court requested an international arrest warrant for him over his separatist policies and defying orders of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia’s central government.

During the conference, Dodik spoke out defiantly against the warrant, telling reporters: “The Muslims from Sarajevo, they want to punish me because I came here to Israel, supporting Israel. They are misusing the judiciary and the prosecutor’s office…”

True to fascistic form, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli demonized internal dissent to the conference, calling Israel’s center-left Haaretz newspaper a “beacon of lies and anti-Zionist propaganda,” adding that “Haaretz and others like them do not represent the Jewish people.”

Even former ADL head Abe Foxman, for whom criticism of Israel has been heretofore virtually verboten, said: “I don’t think it is appropriate to have representatives of far-right parties in Europe coming to Jerusalem to meet with the Jewish community and together develop a strategy to fight anti-Semitism when they are part and parcel of the problem of anti-Semitism.” (Reuters, NBC, The Media Line, ToI)

In an attempt to appease criticism of the conference, President Isaac Herzog offered a compromise—a private meeting with world Jewish leaders at his home the night before the main event, without the far-right figures. Fortunately, this failed to mollify the boycotters. (ToI)

Is it necessary to point out the multiple converging ironies here? The Islamophobic anti-immigrant invective spewed forth by Bardella perfectly mirrors that employed against Jews in Western Europe and the US yestercentury. Friedman’s enthusiasm for forced relocation of the Palestinians has obvious echoes in what was inflicted on the European Jews in World War II and its prelude. And have we really already forgotten how Serb “ethnic cleansing,” forced internment and massacre of the Bosnian Muslims in the war of the 1990s was at the time assailed as redolent of the Holocaust?

Dodik presumably didn’t even return to Bosnia from Israel before arriving in Moscow to seek Putin’s shelter from the arrest warrant against him in his own country. (This was reported by Radio Free Europe, which the Trump regime is now conveniently seeking to shut down.)

And Netanyahu himself immediately after the conference flew to Budapest to meet with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, darling of Putin, Trump and the re-emergent forces of international fascism (yes). Orban hosted Bibi over the protests of both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which urged that the Hungarian leader have his guest arrested, in compliance with the warrant against him issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza. (DW)

Image via frgdr Blog. Hebrew lettering in background spells names of places in Europe where Jews were exterminated.