De uitbuiting van huishoudelijk personeel door diplomaten is een oud zeer, ook in Nederland. De Volkskrant schreef vorig jaar dat bij het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken de afgelopen vijf jaar 26 particuliere bedienden van diplomaten geaccrediteerd in Nederland melding hadden gemaakt van uitbuiting. Het ging daarbij om onderbetaling, slechte arbeidsomstandigheden en ongewenste omgangsvormen. Tot nu…

In June 2017, the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflicts published a briefing on ‘Armed Non-State Actors and International Human Rights Law: An Analysis of the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly’. In this blog post, I demonstrate why the briefing – and the data collected in the annexes –…

Het zijn barre tijden voor iedereen die gelooft in multilaterale oplossingen voor transnationale problemen. Vooral de verkiezing van Donald Trump, en de serie maatregelen die in de eerste paar maanden van zijn presidentschap uit het Witte Huis zijn komen rollen, hebben het vertrouwen in multilaterale samenwerking flink onder druk gezet. Na politiek-militaire samenwerking op de…

Eens in de zoveel tijd wordt de rechtswetenschap – en vaak kort daarna de rechtspraktijk getroffen door de plotsklapse aandacht voor een voorheen onderbelicht thema en blijkt er opeens een ‘trending topic’ te zijn opgestaan. De zogenoemde ‘omkeringsregel’ was er zo een, net als de klachtplicht, en recenter de juridische problemen rondom zelfrijdende auto’s. Zo’n…

Between 18 and 20 May 2017, Ucall organized its second biennial international conference, titled ‘Accountability and International Business Operations: Providing Justice for Corporate Violations of Human Rights, Labor and Environmental Standards’. The conference included presentations by various keynote speakers and panelists, a stakeholders’ roundtable and a PhD masterclass (see the programme). In this post, some…

On 2 May 2017, Jelle Leunis obtained his PhD in political science from the Free University of Brussels (VUB) on the accountability of private military and security companies (PMSCs), a topic that in this past has proved of interest to UCall too. The full title of the thesis is: ‘The regulatory governance of armed force:…

  On 28 April 2017, Sofia Barros successfully defended her PhD at Leuven University on the topic of the responsibility of member states in the context of their participation in international organizations (full title: “Governance as Responsibility – Member State Participation in International Financial Institutions and the Quest for Effective Human Rights Protection”). I had…

On 21 April 2017, the Court of Appeal of ‘s-Hertogenbosch convicted Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven to 19 years of imprisonment for, inter alia, complicity in war crimes committed in Liberia. In the late 1990s Kouwenhoven had provided arms to the murderous regime of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who was later convicted to 50 years…

On 20 January 2017, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that it had no jurisdiction over claims brought by two trade unions against the European Patent Organization (EPO), an international organization (partly) based in The Hague. The Court held that the organization enjoyed immunity from the jurisdiction of Dutch courts in accordance with the EPO Protocol…

Last week, Justice Fraser writing for the London High Court dismissed Okpabi v. RDS and SPDC, a claim of a group of Nigerian plaintiffs against Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary. This dismissal has prompted strong responses by NGOs involved in the region such as Amnesty International, calling it a severe setback for…