The EU has issued tepid statements in response to the recent 11-day crisis in Palestine, ignoring the violence perpetrated by Israeli authorities. This post suggests that the EU’s silence is consistent with the positions of the Member States and the EU’s established policy but does not sit well with its alleged “values”.

The crisis in Palestine has sparked reactions across the globe. Some actors have energetically condemned Israel’s actions; before the 21 May ceasefire, the Tunisian foreign minister, e.g., “called on ending the savage Israeli aggression on the occupied Palestinian territories and the besieged Gaza Strip”. Others have sided with Israel; the US, in particular, stressed its “strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself”.

The European Union largely followed the US approach. The statements of EU leaders stigmatised the violence perpetrated by Hamas but not the abuses conducted, on a larger scale, by Israeli authorities (see below, section 1). The silence of EU institutions is unsurprising, since it is consistent with the priorities of its Member States (section 2), the EU’s established policy (section 3) and the pragmatic character of the EU’s external relations: the Union often preaches its “values” but seldom practices them (section 4).

A recent post on this blog has highlighted a certain trend among European states towards an opening of their courts to foreign direct liability cases. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court has just struck another blow against transnational human rights litigation against corporations.

On 24 April 2018, the United States Supreme Court rendered its long-awaited judgment in Jesner et al v. Arab Bank PLC (Jesner, 584 U.S.).

The claim adds to the extensive list of lawsuits filed under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), an 18^th-century statute which grants US courts jurisdiction over “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” (28 U.S.C. para 1350).

Alice Ollino, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca In her post on the burkini and the crisis of (international) law, Bérénice Schramm warned us against the limits of mainstream legal narratives that accommodate discrimination against women, and suggested revisiting the foundations of international law in order to attain full equality. The

Luca d’Ambrosio, Collège de France L’image du corps d’un enfant syrien échoué sur une plage turque a provoqué une onde de choc en Europe. À l’origine de ce choc, la réduction sacrilège de corps humains à la « vie nue ». À de simples corps transportables, traçables, jetables. Et pourtant, une fois

Duncan B. Hollis, Temple University School of Law War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (1832), Bk. 1, Ch. 3. It is a cruel

On 12 May 2014 the Court, sitting as a Grand Chamber, delivered  the judgment on just satisfaction in Cyprus v. Turkey [hereinafter: Judgment], the first of this kind in inter-State proceedings under art. 33 ECHR. The Court awarded to the applicant State a substantial sum to compensate the material and

On 7 November 2013, the European Court of Human Rights (Court hereinafter) handed down its much-awaited decision in Vallianatos and Others v Greece (applications nos. 29381/09 and 32684/09), and delivered the first major win for gay rights in Greece. In an exemplary ruling, the Court held Greece to be in violation of

The recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court on same-sex marriage (both dated 26 June 2013: U.S. v. Windsor, 2013 U.S. LEXIS 4921 and Hollingsworth v. Perry, 2013 U.S. LEXIS 4919) triggered the question of whether States should recognize the right to marry a person of the same sex. In

Increasing attention is being drawn on the ‘Cypriot case’, which has been causing considerable turbulence on the financial markets and raising remarkable political and legal concerns. The attitude taken by the European and international Institutions while dealing with the Cypriot crisis might seem somewhat fuzzy and confused if compared with