International Humanitarian Law

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools are already in use to help identify targets on the battlefield and they might soon power new types of cyber and autonomous weapons. These technologies could have profound implications for the role of humans in armed conflict and there will be important choices ahead. Among the most pressing – for compliance with international...

[Charles C. Jalloh is Professor of Law, Florida International University and Member, International Law Commission. He is Chair of the Panel of Experts on the Election of the Prosecutor. Sabine Nölke is the former Ambassador of Canada to the Kingdom of the Netherlands (currently Chargée d'affaires of Canada to Ireland) and Chair of the Committee on the Election of the...

[Yasmine Nahlawi is an independent researcher specialising in R2P and its applicability to the Syrian and Libyan conflicts. She holds a PhD in Public International Law from Newcastle University, LLM in International Legal Studies from Newcastle University, and BSc in Political Science from Eastern Michigan University.] I would like to begin my response post by expressing my deepest gratitude to the distinguished reviewers of my book,...

[Jessica Peake is the Director of the International and Comparative Law Program and the Assistant Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law.] The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was adopted during the 2005 World Summit to respond to four mass atrocity crimes – genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing – in the aftermath of states’ failures to...

[Anjali Manivannan is the Senior Programs Officer at the World Federalist Movement - Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP), where she leads the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP) Program.] The responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, an opportunity to interrogate the persisting obstacles to its implementation. The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria grounds these problems...

[Shannon Raj Singh is a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford University, where she is researching the duty to prevent atrocity crimes with the Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict's Programme on International Peace and Security. Shannon is also an Associate Legal Officer at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the...

[Yasmine Nahlawi is an independent researcher specialising in R2P and its applicability to the Syrian and Libyan conflicts. She holds a PhD in Public International Law from Newcastle University, LLM in International Legal Studies from Newcastle University, and BSc in Political Science from Eastern Michigan University.] Throughout the Syrian conflict, I led policy initiatives for civilian protection alongside civil society leaders, iNGOs, and public officials within the...

This week, we have the honor of hosting a symposium on Yasmine Nahlawi's recent book, The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria: Mass Atrocities, Human Protection, and International Law. From the publisher: This book offers a novel and contemporary examination of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine from an international legal perspective and analyses how the doctrine was applied within...

[Diane Marie Amann is Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law.] Opinio Juris and Justice in Conflict deserve much credit for the rich discussion they have generated in anticipation of December’s election of the third Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The contributions to this joint symposium have touched...

This post looks at some of the issues and lessons that will impact the new prosecutor, emanating from the few situations related to Asia – a region that is often overlooked in the context of international justice. Other posts in our symposium have gone into details of the prosecutor’s position, responsibilities and qualifications. In this, I take a step back from the minutiae, and look at...

[Danya Chaikel is an international lawyer who has worked for 15 years across several international criminal courts, tribunals, NGOs, professional bodies and the UN. She is the Secretary of the International Bar Association’s War Crimes Committee and coordinated the International Association of Prosecutor’s Forum for International Criminal Justice for nine years. She began her career in The Hague at the ICC in 2010 in the Investigation...

[Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at the Law School and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security & Cooperation at Stanford University. Please don’t miss Patryk I. Labuda’s symposium post at Justice in Conflict.] The relationship between the United States and the ICC has been characterized by change more than continuity....