EJIL Book Discussion

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My patria is the book: Ten good reads 2025

Here, yet again, is my pick of “good reads” from the books I read in 2025. I want to remind you, as I do every year, that these are not “book reviews”, which also explains the relative paucity of law books or books about the law. Many excellent ones have come my way this year, as in previous years, but an excellent law book is not always, in fact rarely is, a “good read” in the sense intended here: curl up on the sofa and enjoy a very good read, maybe even as a respite from an excellent law book. I usually point out that some of these “good reads” are not necessarily literary masterpieces—though in the list this year each recommendation is for a book which in my eyes is a lot more than a “mere” good read, a handful are truly masterpieces. A lot more than ten good reads came my way this year. The selection process was tougher than usual. I was guided by my possibly misguided notion of trying to provide titles…

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Data Protection in Humanitarian Action

Introduction  To mark ten years of progress in data protection in humanitarian action, this post is part of a special blog series accompanying the recently published Routledge volume Data Protection in Humanitarian Action: Responding to Crises in a Data-Driven World. A joint initiative of the Data Protection Office of the…

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Reflection on reviewers’ comments (Russia, the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights)

In this reflection piece, we will offer a few brief observations on the blog posts authored by Alice Donald, Kirill Koroteev and Nils Muižnieks, to whom we are most grateful. The three contributions appear to complement one another in broadly contending that more could—and perhaps should—have been done while Russia remained a member of the Council of Europe…

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The Council of Europe and Russia Relationship: A view from Russian Civil Society

After the Interstellar movie came out a meme started circulating among Russian human rights lawyers. Depicting protagonists on a faraway planet the picture had a caption saying, “One hour on this planet is seven years on Earth. Perfect place to wait for a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights”. As I write this blog the ink…

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Russia and the Council of Europe: The troubled membership from the perspective of a Commissioner for Human Rights

The volume Russia, the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights should be essential reading for a number of different audiences.  It is very useful to have a detailed documentation of the fractious relationship of the organisation with one of its most important members. The book speaks to those pondering the difficulty of attempting to…

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