Ethnic cleansing is now a reality rooted in international relations. Confronted with this phenomenon in recent years, the international community has attempted to capture it in positive law. However, various efforts to prohibit and punish the practice under international law have taken shortcuts, further confusing an already complex topic. The aim of this critical reflection is to contribute to a legal understanding of ethnic cleansing by adopting a comprehensible and teleological approach that addresses the true objects and purposes of the practice. The goal of such an approach is to encourage international legal scholars to open a new chapter in the study of international crimes, one in which the autonomous status of ethnic cleansing is firmly established in positive international law.

Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the Greek–Turkish population exchange uprooted and resettled hundreds of thousands. The aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for minorities – all familiar features of the Allies’ management of imperial disintegration in Europe after 1919. Nor was it to restructure a given economy and society from top to bottom, generating an entirely new legal order in the process; this had often been the case with colonialism, and would characterize much of the Mandate System in the interbellum. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique legal mechanism – not in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from most extra-European governance regimes – in order to resolve ethno-national conflict by redividing land, reshaping national identities, and unleashing new processes of capital accumulation.

We describe a long-range migration of a pre-moulting adult chinstrap penguin from Bouvetøya, a small relatively recently established colony, to the South Sandwich Islands, where large, established colonies of this species reside. The trip lasted around three weeks, covered ∼3600 km, and the time of arrival was consistent with the annual moult. The bird did not travel along the shortest path or along a constant bearing, but instead followed what appeared to be a series of two or three rhumb lines of constant bearing. Small southward and northward deviations from the general path were consistent with local water currents. Travel speeds were high during daylight but decreased at night, suggesting that resting or opportunistic feeding occurred preferentially at night. While long-range winter migrations of chinstraps to feeding areas in the vicinity of distant colonies have been previously described, this is the first observation of such a trip during the period between breeding and moulting, and the first record of an individual actually arriving at one of these distant colonies. This has implications for understanding population structure and management of this important Southern Ocean predator.