The Past, Present, and Future of the Palestine Investigation

In-person event

On May 20th, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan KC, announced that his Office had applied for arrest warrants against three senior Hamas leaders and two high-ranking Israeli government officials. This talk, which is based on Professor Kevin Jon Heller’s role as Special Adviser on War Crimes to the Prosecutor, will discuss the past, present, and future of the investigation in Palestine. He will explain what a Special Adviser does, provide a history of the Palestine investigation, discuss the arrest-warrant applications, and offer a few thoughts for what the future might hold for the warrants and the investigation more generally.

About the author:

Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Military Studies and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. He is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London and currently serves as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on War Crimes.

Prof. Heller’s books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2011) and four co-edited volumes: The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Stanford, 2010), The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (OUP, 2013), the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2018), and Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (OUP, 2021). He is currently co-writing a book with Samuel Moyn (Yale) provisionally entitled The Vietnam War and International Law. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the international-law blog Opinio Juris, where he has blogged for more than 17 years.

Prof. Heller has been involved in the practice of international law throughout his career, most notably acting as one of Radovan Karadzic’s formally-appointed legal associates at the ICTY; serving as the plaintiffs’ sole expert witness in Salim v Mitchell, a successful Alien Tort Statute case against the psychologists who designed and administered the CIA’s torture program; functioning as UNITAD’s Special Expert for International Criminal and Humanitarian Law; and acting as legal advisor to and expert witness for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the defendants in the 9/11 trial at Guantanamo Bay.

Wednesday 17 July, 1-2pm AEST

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly presented by the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney Law School