During last October of 2016, Burundi became the first country of the 124 members of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) to announce its withdrawal from the treaty. Shortly after, Gambia and South Africa followed suit. The latter has stated that the obligations set forth in the Rome Statute regarding the arrest […]
It is said that in the 1930s an English newspaper published once the following headline: “Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off”. Ever since, it has been considered a token of the British national character and as an evidence of the British longstanding attitude vis-à-vis the continent. And no wonder, as the island has been […]
The news of yet another terrorist attack by ISIS on European soil in a few years confirms for Europe what has been a reality for some time now in other parts of the world: Armed groups willing to resort to terrorist tactics are a real and continuous threat for international security. The historian Plutarch narrates […]
The terrorist attacks committed by ISIS on November 13 in Paris have provoked a wave of international solidarity toward the victims and the French people. However, the defenders of ethical impartiality have swiftly come out to criticize those who only get touched by a tragedy taking place in Paris, while looking the other way vis-à-vis […]
On September 30 Russia intervened militarily in the internal armed conflict that has engulfed Syria since 2011. The Russian government claims that it only targeted ISIS and other personnel “looking and acting like terrorists”. NATO, on the contrary, accuses Russia of rendering military assistance to its ally, the dictator Bashar Al-Assad, in the fight against […]
The unrest expressed through social protest in Chile has been on the rise during the year 2015, following up on the domestic and international trend started in 2011. In particular, I would like to refer to the acceptability of the recourse to force by actors of the student’s movement for a better education, a recourse […]
On April 21st Oskar Gröning, age 93, appeared before a court of law in the German city of Lüneburg. He is charged with being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews in the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, ran by the Nazi regime during World War Two and where Gröning served as an […]
The massacre perpetrated against the editors of Charlie Hebdo has been treated mainly as a freedom of speech issue. As it is the case with every human right, freedom of speech is subject to certain restrictions. According to international treaties on the subject, war propaganda is not acceptable, nor are expressions that amount to “hate […]
On this day, December 24 2014, enters into force the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. This agreement is meant to regulate international commerce of conventional weapons and to eradicate the illicit traffic thereof, so as to contribute to peace, security and the reduction of human suffering. These purposes, especially the last one, transform the new […]
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue”. This phrase is usually ascribed to the French writer François de La Rochefoucauld. What it entails is a very simple proposition: Vice supposes by definition the existence of a positive or virtuous extreme, with regards to which the former is deemed underachieving. Hypocrisy would mean, in this […]