Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

[INTRO TUNE]

Steph 00:09 Hi Janet.

Janet 00:10 Hi Steph.

Steph 00:11 Earlier this year, when I was just getting back to work after some medical stuff that kept me at home, you sent me off on a very long day to chat to a bunch of different people.

Janet 00:23 Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I couldn’t get back to the Netherlands in time to help out, but I thought that it was kind of a nice way to ease you back into the business, wasn’t it?

Steph 00:33 It was, and it was nice to see everybody, and it was nice to know that I could still walk around all day and actually do this thing and do this job, so it got me a little more confidence that I will be alright in the end.

Janet 00:45 And what actually was it that was going on?

Steph 00:47 Well, I was going to the conference of the War Crimes Committee of the International Bar Association, so it’s basically a day of panels and talks, all with super interesting people, many people we’ve had on the podcast or that I now want on the podcast, who talked about international law and international criminal proceedings.

Janet 01:06 Ok, we’re going to get into the detail in a bit, but just from your kind of perch-like position, sort of at a distance from it all, what would you say were the main themes that you gleaned from it all?

Steph 01:20 There’s a couple of different strands to pull out. There was a lot about AI and technology and how that changes international justice. There was, of course, a lot about the perceived threats against international justice and the position of the US and all these things.

In the coffee chat in between, it was all about what was going to happen at the ICC with Prosecutor Khan, where the investigation—because at the time the investigation into the alleged sexual harassment was still ongoing. Sexual harassment claims that he denies, by the way.

And I think there was a lot of excitement around universal jurisdiction and universal jurisdiction cases.

Janet 02:00 Yeah, you set me the task of listening to all of this and editing some of it. Something that struck me, maybe we’ll repeat this again a bit later, is how closely our podcast mirrors what is going on in these people’s brains—the people who are doing the investigating, the people who are doing the academic work to examine what’s going on. It really does feel like our podcast. There was nothing that came up in this that I thought, “Wow, I’ve never heard that before.” It really did feel like, yeah, that’s our lifeblood too, us too.

Of course, we were very happy to have been given access by the International Bar Association’s War Crimes Committee. They even set up a separate office for you to use. So, should we hear some of the extracts from the interviews? Where should we start?

Steph 02:54 Absolutely. It was very lovely. I had a nice little office tucked away that I could have all these interviews in. And let’s kick off today’s kind of, I don’t know what the word is anymore.

Janet 03:06 Smorgasbord. Yes, smorgasbord. That’s the one I always use when I have no idea what to say, that I’ve got a range of different stuff on offer.

Steph 03:14 Let’s kick off today’s smorgasbord of comments with Alex Prezanti. He’s a barrister at Artemis Chambers, and he’s the director of the State Capture Accountability Project. And Polina Levina, a UN official who investigates financial crimes in connection with atrocities.

And their panel was about how corporate financial and legal actors are increasingly implicated in atrocity crimes. And by that, they kind of mean, you know, where are people earning money and supplying weapons or facilitating alleged perpetrators from evading sanctions against them? And you’ll hear that I keep asking the same question to kind of drag out of them what they really feel about what’s going on in international law. And there’s a lot of negativity.

Janet 03:58 Yeah, I mean, let’s be clear, there is a lot of bad shit going on in our line of work at the moment.

Steph 04:05 But we thought it would be interesting to pick up also the points of light in what’s going well and what they expect more from. So here is first Polina, and she is followed by Alex.

Polina Levina 04:16 What is going well is creative approaches to accountability, among them financial investigations. Financial investigations are like a Swiss Army knife in international crimes accountability processes. The reason I say this is because, in my experience leading a financial investigations team at the United Nations, there are four things that financial investigations allow you to do. The first is that if you start with the crime rather than the assets of the perpetrator, you centre victims and the harm suffered. The second is that it allows you to expand jurisdictional opportunities by looking at who is enabling the crimes, where they are holding their assets, where they’re operating, where they’re residing. The third is that financial evidence is great linkage evidence. So, it strengthens your core international crime case. And the fourth is that from the get-go, you’ve built in quantifying the harm suffered, as I said, which then allows you later down in the legal process—if you get to the phase of reparations—you have the evidentiary foundation to quantify what the extent of the harm suffered is and the compensation needed for the crimes perpetrated.

Steph 05:41 And that’s your light point. Is there anything that you can point out specifically that we saw in the last year in this realm, or a kind of investigation that you can talk about? Which, of course, there are a lot of things that you can talk about, I’m sure. But is there something you can highlight that happened in that realm that we can look at?

Polina Levina 06:00 One of the major international legal developments in the last year has been the Gambia versus Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice. What’s been very interesting about that case is that both parties relied quite extensively on the evidence collected by the independent investigative mechanism from Myanmar. And within that pool of evidence was a report produced by the financial investigations team of the mechanism focusing on the destruction and dispossession of Rohingya land and property. But essentially, what it did was lay out the full chain of evidence from the destruction of Rohingya villages. Their levelling, raising the construction of security bases using evidence such as budget allocations, corporate documentation, and extensive open-source evidence. And named the corporation that was involved in the construction of those security bases, often tracing the exact shape of the Rohingya villages that once stood in those areas.

Steph 07:02 In a way, it’s like the financial or having the receipts- it’s a bit like—I love my ICTY precedents, and so I remember that in the Srebrenica cover-up case of the reburial, a lot of the evidence was the receipts from fuel from the trucks and the allocations in the military about giving extra fuel so you can have diggers. And then they would create these tertiary and even quaternary mass graves because they’re trying to hide the evidence. So, you’re saying that this is also in the Myanmar case at the ICTY, which I haven’t—I mean, I’ve heard about it—but a lot of the evidence that we see or that we report upon is, of course, the kind of eyewitness evidence. And I hadn’t quite clocked that there was this financial evidence underlying. So, thank you for pointing that out.

Alex, is this also kind of your light point? I know there’s a lot you can’t talk about. So, is there something you can say about where the positives were in the past year?

Alex Prezanti 08:00 Well, to me, the positives don’t really come through international institutions or international law in this past year, but really the domestic jurisdictions and efforts by national courts or national authorities. So, I mean, if we take a bit longer than a year, I think that’s a recognition by Western governments that they have leverage over financial systems, over supply chains, and they can use that leverage to make an impact on war crimes or conflicts themselves. And that’s been used, of course, extensively in the war and Russia’s aggression on Ukraine, but also has been used in many other contexts. In the context of accountability, I would say that the Lafarge verdict in France is probably the most interesting development in the past year.

Steph 08:55 I’m going to give a bit of context here, which is that Lafarge is a cement company in France that was convicted and fined for what was it- they were giving ISIS money to protect or to keep their cement factories running in ISIS-held territory.

Alex Prezanti 09:12 That’s right. They were effectively paying a bribe to ISIS, not only ISIS, but also some other terrorist organisations, and they’re effectively paying a bribe. And they were doing it not to preserve the interests of the local communities. They were doing it because—and we know this from evidence in the trial—they thought that there would be a lot of scope for future profits from reconstruction in that region. And so it was important for them to stay in the market. And that’s why they paid the bribe.

And what’s really interesting about this development is that, for the first time, I mean, we’ve had cases, most notably the Lundin case in Sweden, where CEOs and managers are accused of crimes. But here we have the actual corporation that is held to account and fined. Okay, the fine may not be huge, 1.25 million euros.

Steph 10:10 Which is probably pocket change for Lafarge.

Alex Prezanti 10:13 Correct. But I think that it’s a positive development in that it is now out there that a corporation like this has to take into account more than just profits for its shareholders, but also has to take into account the impact that it’s doing. And if it doesn’t, then it could face accountability.

Steph 10:34 And the Lundin case, I’m just going to Stephopedia all of this—which we will link to all these cases, of course, also in the show notes. The Lundin case is a Swedish oil company that paid local militias to protect oil fields in Sudan, effectively contributing to these militias potentially committing crimes.

Polina Levina 10:53 Can I just add that, in addition to holding the corporation responsible, I mean, the two former executives of Lafarge were arrested in the courtroom. This 69-year-old former CEO and his former deputy, who is 75 years old, each, I think, were convicted for years. Which, as corporate executives, to face arrest and imprisonment, feels ground-breaking in this moment.

Steph 11:19 Is that also your kind of most interesting development in accountability?

Polina Levina 11:24 So, it’s very recent. Of course, there’s more to follow with the Lafarge case, because the next phase of it will specifically look at crimes against humanity. So, from an international criminal law perspective, it definitely feels like a very significant moment and one that is maybe the start of some very exciting follow-up developments.

Steph 11:45 I ask the same questions of Lindsay Freeman, who’s at Berkeley Human Rights Centre, and Yuval Shany, who’s been working on the kinds of charters that AI companies are coming up with to regulate their work. Lindsay has long been at the forefront of open-source intelligence and thinking about how civil society can access social media, and now understands the new challenges that artificial intelligence poses, or at least we hope she does. Their panel was about ethical guardrails for AI and within conflicts and the new opportunities that there also are for civil society, but also militaries, combatants and despots. So, the whole mixed bag of what AI brings to all the different actors on the battlefield, not only the kind of people who want to do bad things with it, but also the people who would potentially use it for good.

So here is Lindsay, and she’s followed by Yuval.

Lindsay Freeman 12:40 Well, I am really excited about the technology and what AI brings to bear on our work. I think it has tremendous applications. It does actually kind of feel like in the last two weeks, they’ve solved the digital evidence issues I’ve been talking about for the last decade. I don’t know if that’s overstating it, but really, AI is incredibly empowering in allowing you to code your own tools that are fit for purpose in a way that we just weren’t able to do before. And there’s a lot of potential in terms of what I’ve seen. I’ve really had some jaw-dropping moments even in the last few weeks—“Oh, wow, what we can do now.” It really is a force multiplier. So, the sort of speed of delivery and enforcement, I think we could hugely close that gap with the responsible and ethical use of AI in those tools. I also think that trying to be optimistic about the field, it may need some disruption.

These older institutions in the post-World War II period made a lot of sense and held peace for a long time, but were they working for everyone? I think that’s a really fair question of maybe the UN wasn’t equal to all states, and not everyone was happy with it—all of these institutions. So I think the disruption, while the way it’s happened has not been great, it maybe creates new opportunity for something that needed to happen and to build something better.

Steph 14:23 Yuval, do you see bright spots, and what are they? What’s the thing you look at and think, Oh, okay, this gives me some hope?

Yuval Shany 14:31 Yeah, well, I see some spots, some of them have some bright shades. I wouldn’t exaggerate how bright they are, but I would say, well, the language of international law is still relevant. So even states that do not practise international law still go about the effort of trying to, because it’s still to explain or to justify their conduct on the basis of international law, because it still serves A, as a common language of legitimacy in many realms and B, for some states, it is still an important framework. So not all hope is lost.

I would also say that we are seeing, in some respects, international law being more dominant than before in many areas of the public discourse. And we are seeing a lot of activism, which invokes the language of international law. And with regard to technology, I would- while technology is certainly- we have a mixed record with technology, because law is always struggling to catch up with new technology. And international law has not been doing a great job so far in this regard. I mean, even domestic law is very much behind. International law, with its cumbersome decision-making processes, is even farther behind.

But I would say that in this realm, there are also some reasons for optimism. One is, I think, that this development comes at a time when there is greater awareness of the role of companies and the responsibility of companies. And hence, a lot of the activism and a lot of the political pushback is directed not at governments, but at companies. And we have seen, in this regard, some companies step up and integrate international standards, human rights standards, into their policies—far from perfect. But having, I mean, a company like Meta, for instance, integrating human rights policies into its business policies and establishing an Oversight Board, which operates as a sort of Facebook Supreme Court to monitor human rights—an imperfect experience; there is also criticism. But I think this is something we have never seen before in terms of the ability of international law and human rights law specifically to penetrate spaces that were before closed to it.

And with regard to the point that Lindsay said about the promise of AI, of course, AI could be a force multiplier for many good projects, such as resolving world hunger, such as promoting economic development, such as dealing with lawlessness. We are still, I would say, at an inflexion point where it’s not obvious whether these positive applications would outweigh the negative, because it’s also potentially a force multiplier in the opposite direction. So, there are opportunities on the table. The question is whether we as a human society would be able to make use of these positive opportunities.

Steph 17:29 Lindsay, you already mentioned a kind of interesting development in accountability, I would say, by essentially—I think it’s called “vibe coding”—kind of being able, as a layperson who doesn’t programme, to kind of tell these models what kind of tools you want to make. Is that something that you would lift out as the most interesting development in accountability? Or are there other things you want to mention?

Lindsay Freeman 17:55 I think that’s interesting. One caveat I will say is that I do think you need some baseline technical knowledge to do it and do it well. And on my team, I have some very, very technical people who can look over the code. So that is one of those things where there could be danger of people who don’t know what they’re doing or using it. But I think it does have huge potential. And if you have that sort of baseline technical knowledge, it does kind of feel right now like the world is your oyster and you can do some really interesting things. So I think, you know, people have talked about this concern of AI replacing critical thinking. But I also think it is prompting new creativity and critical thinking. If you really get creative about how you can use it and start seeing it as this tool that can work for you and think outside of the box, it actually can be very good for enhancing your thinking and learning new ways to think.

Steph 18:59 Yuval, is there something you want to lift out as an interesting development in accountability that you’re looking forward to being developed further?

Yuval Shany 19:07 Well, I think in many respects, human rights law has been working very much downstream, trying to deal with violations as they happen. And I think a central ethos was protecting victims. But that’s a bit Sisyphean. I mean, there are so many violations. So, your ability to actually deal with violations at the root cause level and actually stem the problems was quite limited, especially given the limited leverage that human rights enforcement bodies have vis-à-vis states, etc.

With technology-driven violations, it’s a bit different. I think, actually, we have a very limited capacity to deal with downstream violations because of the scale. But we may have a better capacity to deal with upstream issues. And if so, if we can get the big companies—and there are still, I mean, there are a few, but still relatively, I mean, the numbers are still manageable. If we can get the large companies on board and have them integrate, for instance, human rights standards into the models, this is something that could have a very significant impact on the world of human rights going forward.

So this is, again, a very critical moment. I must say that I still haven’t seen this happening so far. So even Anthropic, who’s been cast as the good guy in the recent drama of the Department of War saga regarding the military use of the Claude Code. Even Anthropic, when you look at their very recent constitution, which is this policy document, which is actually, whose audience is actually Claude, right? You would look very difficult for the words human rights and you will not find them. It’s not mentioned once in the document. I mean, there are other things that are, I mean, some aspects like privacy are mentioned. Safety is mentioned. The system is instructed not to kill humanity, not to exterminate the entirety of humanity. But we still haven’t seen…

Steph 21:07 That’s very broad brush strokes.

Yuval Shany 21:08 Sorry?

Steph 21:09 That’s very broad brush strokes.

Yuval Shany 21:11It’s a bit of broad-brush backstop. But we haven’t seen so far a full-fledged integration of this body of norms. We’re still working with frameworks like “AI safety”, “AI ethics”, and “responsible AI,” which are good, but they do not actually dispose of the need to also integrate human rights head-on into the system. So again, the opportunity is there. We have still not generated sufficient momentum to realise this opportunity. In terms of my own work, this is actually what I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, trying to develop at least human rights formulations that would be amenable to implementation in these sorts of upstream contexts.

Janet 21:56 I found it really interesting to listen back to all of that from Yuval and from Lindsay because of the two podcasts that we did last month and a little bit earlier. The first one was about targeting artificial intelligence and the ethical issues of having machines making very fast decisions rather than humans about who should be targeted. And the second one was about how investigators are now using AI, which can maybe help make more connections. But there are so many additional issues to be considered to do with interoperability, you know, between different AI systems, and defence rights. I mean, what happens in court when you present material that’s been sort of developed in particular ways? So all kinds, again, of legal and ethical challenges. So for me, sort of listening to that discussion between the two of them helped me, maybe, I don’t know, balance out a little bit the outlines of the issues?

That’s not to say, though, we won’t be critiquing AI more in the field. I think there are still many questions to be asked. We have lots more pods planned on this new element in this field.

So, who else did you manage to speak to?

Steph 23:13 Well, there was also a panel on climate change in relation to conflict and environmental crimes increasingly being used as a weapon of war. This is a subject, you know, that you and I have also talked about a lot. We did a lot of-

Janet 23:26 Oh, my goodness. So much. So many pods.

Steph 23:29 So many ecocide pods, including the ICC, Office of the Prosecutor’s own policy on climate-related crimes.

Janet 23:35 Yeah. And we’ve also done stuff specifically on ecocide, which at one point was considered potentially as a new crime for the ICC’s Rome Statute. Not so sure about that. But maybe most importantly, we did- you and I both spent quite a lot of time around the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate, partly because so many states got involved again in that. And now that’s come out, and there are obligations on the states to protect their citizens and the natural environment.

So, who did they have to speak on that, or who did you manage to get from that panel?

Steph 24:14 I spoke with Maksym Popov, who is now the first secretary of the Ukrainian embassy in The Hague, but before was at the Ukraine Office of the Prosecutor and worked on the Nova Kakhovka Dam situation. And there was Charles-Edouard Renault, who is a partner at the French law firm De Gaulle, Florence.

I want to ask you specifically both what you are working on and what we should look out for in the coming year in development.

Maksym Popov 24:44 I had the privilege to work for the last three years, starting from the full-scale invasion in 2022, in the Prosecutor General’s office as an advisor to the Prosecutor General. And I was in charge of strengthening the capacity of Ukraine to investigate and prosecute wartime environmental damage.

So basically, we were at the forefront of developing the practice and the case law of individual criminal responsibility for the wartime environmental damage. And right now, when I moved to The Hague and started my career in the embassy as a diplomat, I still, at heart, continue as an expert to help our Ukrainian colleagues on the ground to do this job. And I would say that this run really changed the global perspective and value of the natural environment from the perspective of different actors.

So basically, at the end of 2025, the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC, they finally finished the work on the policy of environmental crimes under the Rome Statute. And we believe, and we know for sure, that partly they progressed in this work because of Ukrainian endeavours and because we spoke so loudly and did our job well in terms of doing this investigation and prosecuting domestically.

Steph 26:16 Now that I have an expert on this in front of me, the big flagship case about that, that we also did a podcast on, is, of course, the Nova Kakhovka Dam. Where is that case at the moment? Are there other cases in Ukraine that really, really we should know about, but we’re all looking at the dam?

Maksym Popov 26:33 Yes. So, as for the Kakhovka Dam case, the Kakhovka Dam was destructed by Russian militaries on the 6th of June, 2023. That was almost three years ago, and the case is still in the pretrial stage.

I believe it’s probably the most severe environmental disaster happened on European continents during last decades. So there are a lot of efforts allocated to collect evidence on both sides—war crimes- and also the second component of the qualification is ecocide. We have no criminal code specific article that prescribes criminal responsibility. So, it takes a while to collect all the evidence and substantially prepare the case for the court.

As for the other cases, it almost seems to me that 300 cases have been registered of wartime environmental damage in Ukraine. The biggest one, there are five other dams that were attacked. Some of them were destroyed, for example, Oskil Dam, that were partly destroyed in 2022. It’s in the Kharkiv region. Also, the second category is attacks against nuclear power plants and nuclear objects. So, we have a scientific nuclear institute in Kharkiv that was attacked by different types of weapons in 2022, more than 70 times. There is a storage of nuclear materials. Hopefully, these weapons, missiles and drones didn’t reach the specific storage, and there was no contamination. But we charged the Russian military on the ecocide article basis because it prescribes that ecocide in Ukraine is also any actions that may cause environmental disaster.

The second example is the occupation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant at the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. And also attacked by the Shahed drone during the confinement in February 2025. So, we also have a case registered by the Ukrainian authority that is right now being investigated and prosecuted.

And so the first case about the Kharkiv nuclear facility. So, this case is already in court. So, we expect to have a verdict soon.

Steph 28:46 Thank you. We’ll look out for that.

Charles, you are also looking very much at these weapons groups. Is there work that you’re doing that we should look out for in the coming year? Something to come out with that or something else that you want to flag up?

Charles-Edouard Renault 29:02 Perhaps a very quick specification. It’s interesting to see within the banks that are asked to lend money for rearming Europe that defence has become, quote unquote, a resilient activity. So, I think more globally it means that our society, our Western society and our European society have indeed to become resilient. Took really example of the way the Ukrainian people have faced these terrible situations in 2022. We need more and more to be resilient for the coming years.

And based on that, I think there are probably two main directions. The first one is accountability. It’s, in fact, linked with what we already said about the immunity. It means that we shall have a judicial institution in a position to fight back and find the liability and the guilt of all kinds of aggressors. You have the standard war abroad, and you also have the hybrid war within the territory of the European Union, and so more and more we have to use legal ways to fight back at any time.

I think that the second we must be ready to chase any rogue foreign state and be ready to deprive them for this principle of immunity which is not an absolute principle anymore and that’s a notion that under case law has evolved very slowly but has indeed evolved, and I think that in the coming year will come to an era where any state war aggressor could be deprived of that immunity in court.

And the second thing I think we should look into is this development, this notion of ecocide—and it comes more and more present within the authorities, state authority and legal authority, and I think we shall really take a good look at the International Court of Justice judgement of February 9th of 2022. It was a case between the Democratic Republic of Congo against Uganda, and the High Court considered that Uganda was indeed responsible for damages to nature by overexploiting the resources and by destroying fields and also exploiting protected wildlife. I think this is a case precedent that’s going to be used to strengthen that very concept of ecocide in other regions of conflict.

Janet 31:55 I’d love to do a whole series on different things that have come out of the International Court of Justice—some of which I think many people have forgotten about—but they are actually big judgments sometimes and sometimes big opinions. And I’d really like to look at what kind of effect they have actually had because I think these are long-term things. And you know what we’re like as journalists—you know it’s now, has to be now—and it would just be so nice to have a little bit more space to really think long-term, you know? What have been the implications of something that was decided five years ago, ten years ago, etc, etc? So, if anybody would like to sponsor that, you know, you never know.

Steph 32:38 Get in touch, yeah.

I also spoke to a friend of the pod, Milena Stereo, and Natalia Kubesch. Their panel was ‘Justice Running on Empty,’ which really kind of dove into the fairly bleak picture of the international justice mechanism facing a chronic funding crisis, and they spoke out about apparent duplications, overlaps and who loses out in the fight for global attention.

Janet 33:06 Ooh, yikes. Did you actually dare to ask them for their points of light? Were you so contrary, Stephanie?

Steph 33:14 Well, I mean, I asked for, you know, what’s going wrong. After they finished explaining all of the kinds of problems with that, I did ask for their points of light, and they had quite a few, and they were quite uplifting in the end.

So here is Natalia.

Natalia Kubesch 33:31 Well, I think it’s fair to say that 2026 has already been pretty relentless, so it can be quite hard to pick out the good things. But maybe one development where we are continuing to see positive movements is in the use of universal jurisdiction across different countries.

For those of you who know the resource, the Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review is due to be published, and it clearly shows a trend of more states using universal jurisdiction in lieu of international justice mechanisms and also in more creative ways. So maybe just to give you some figures, in 2025 we saw 160 investigations ongoing. We saw 28 new cases being opened and 29 convictions.

And some of these cases actually established legal precedent. So, we saw Finland convicting a war criminal from Russia in what is so far the first conviction relating to the war in Ukraine. We also saw Germany beginning a trial for starvation as a form of warfare, and then in Sweden, the first conviction for genocide for the transfer of children involving Yazidi women and girls.

So overall, we think that’s a very positive development, maybe signalling a shift of the epicentre for international justice from the international institutions more to domestic courts.

Steph 34:47 And we have the final word from Milena.

Milena Sterio 34:51 I think that despite the fact that we’re witnessing significant violations of international law, at the same time we’re seeing almost like a return to international law in the sense that state world leaders are increasingly calling for a respect of international legal norms and increasingly saying that there is a set of things that they will just not do because it violates international law. And I think that’s a positive development.

I also think that we’re seeing among international law scholars almost a unanimous call for the respect of the international legal order, as we have witnessed it since 1945. And so, I think that despite the fact that we’re witnessing violations, at the same time we’re seeing this rhetoric of the importance of international law—that we need to preserve the international legal order, that it would be a dangerous world if we all said, “Well, let’s just do as we please and abandon the rules as we’ve known them since 1945.” So, I am on that front more optimistic, perhaps and hope that I do think that the international legal order will survive all of this.

Janet 35:57 So much, like I said, right up at the top seems to reflect on what our podcast is all about. Like all these universal jurisdiction cases that they refer to as being very positive, and we’re doing this continuing universal jurisdiction series, asking what different jurisdictions are up to and how things are developing there.

Steph 36:25 Yeah, my main takeaway from all the positives was that universal jurisdiction is really gathering pace, not only for war crimes but also for the kind of humanitarian law linked to companies, and those are finally being held to account. We recorded so much more than we can actually broadcast now, but we essentially chose to play one big answer for each person, plus a little more, because it would have gone to a two-hour episode if not.

Janet 36:58 And, I mean, you’d said already with the big themes for you, but out of what we didn’t get to play, was there anything that you want to remember from what people are working on? Anything that you say we’ve got to do a podcast about, or maybe any of the other common themes? I noticed specifically the Lafarge case in France and the amazing implications from that. It didn’t just come up in one conversation; it came up in several of them. So that’s really resonating in our community. But anything that you, particularly what we didn’t manage to use in the clips?

Steph 37:36 I think the Lafarge was really big because it had just also been handed down. I thought something that made my ears prick up and think that it was really interesting is that there was about to be a French, I think, Supreme Court ruling on the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam as an environmental crime, which the French lawyer spoke about. I thought it was heartening because it was not only so many years ago, but it also involved kind of themes of universal jurisdiction and countries’ responsibility for corporations producing these chemicals used in alleged crimes, and that even so many years post-date, they could still do these cases. So, I thought that was really interesting.

There was another speaker that we’re also trying to have on the pod who had some really interesting things to say about AI and using that to translate victim statements, which, really, I think I immediately messaged you and said we must have. So those are the things that I really remember from that.

But also, it was a long day, and I was quite tired. It was my first actual day doing full work again.

Janet 38:47 Well, I say thank you to you for doing all of that work on our behalf, but also specifically thank you to Elsa Wyllie, Kirsty Sutherland and Daniela Gavshon, who are all members of the IBA War Crimes Committee, and they really helped facilitate the fact that we were able to have a smooth recording.

Steph 39:08 Yeah, and I would really like to thank Leon Kopitz and Julia Brown, who are our “infatigable” interns who are both studying and were both doing exams for their LLMs at the University of Amsterdam. And they were really running around and being my arms and legs and helping me on the first day back. So I was really, really grateful for all their help and support.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

This was Asymmetrical Haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg, in partnership with the Hague Humanity Hub. Music is by Audionautix.com. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating, and spread the word.