asymmetrical haircuts

In this episode we set out fearlessly to tackle another acronym that we have heard of, but know little about: the International Law Commission (ILC). It’s an expert bit of the UN, set up by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, and professors and diplomats get elected to it in order to consider how international law should change and advise states accordingly.

It has 34 members. The elections are this month November. And despite representing all the world’s different legal traditions, it has an abysmal record of electing women.

We caught up with two candidates (both professors) – Dapo Akande and Phoebe Okowa – and asked them about diversity, racism and neo-colonialism. They told us they like to run (Phoebe) and watch football (Dapo) and have been reading and listening to, including Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and podcasts Talking Politics and Planet Money

In November the prosecutor’s office in Sweden announced it had brought charges against the chairman and former CEO of Lundin Energy for complicity in war crimes allegedly committed by the Sudanese army and allied militia in southern Sudan from 1999 to 2003 during the so called oil wars.

The basis for the charges was a 2010 report authored by Dutch NGO Pax for Peace on the behalf of the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan called Unpaid Debt. The report sets out the story of how between 1997 and 2003 and oil consortium including Swedish oil firm Lundin, together with Austria’s OMV and Malaysian firm Petronas, tried to secure an area in Southern Sudan known as Block 5 for oil exploration. To get control of the area they paid government forces and militias who committed war crimes, the report says. Thousands of people died in the so-called oil wars and 200,000 people were displaced by the violence, the NGO estimates.

We invited one of the report’s authors Egbert Wesslink to tell us all about it.

This podcast has been published as part of a partnership between Asymmetrical Haircuts and JusticeInfo.net. JusticeInfo is an independent website covering news on justice related to mass violence, so as to promote reconciliation and fight impunity in societies facing serious crises. It is a project of Fondation Hirondelle.