On 4 February 2020, Foreign Policy published an article, “U.N. Chief Faces Internal Criticism over Human Rights”. While the article categorizes failures on the part of the UN relating to the human rights mandate of the organization, I was struck by the allegations relating to the role of the UN’s lawyers, in particular regarding Haiti. On 30 April 2020, the UN...
[Kate Vigneswaran is a Senior Legal Advisor with the International Commission of Jurists.] As other countries across North Africa entered lockdown in March 2020 to prevent and contain the spread of COVID-19, warring parties in Libya ramped up their hostilities. On 24 March 2020, the day after the UN Secretary-General called for a global ceasefire to combat the pandemic, the first diagnosed case of COVID 19 was...
[Dr. Mohamed S. Helal, Assistant Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law and Affiliated Faculty, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University, and is currently serving as a legal counsel with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Please click for Part I and Part II of this three-part post.] In the third and final part of this...
[Dr. Mohamed S. Helal, Assistant Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law and Affiliated Faculty, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University, and is currently serving as a legal counsel with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Part I of this three-part post can be found here.] In part II of this three-part post, I discuss the...
[Dr. Mohamed S. Helal, Assistant Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law and Affiliated Faculty, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University, and is currently serving as a legal counsel with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.] For almost a decade, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan have been engaged in negotiations on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The principal purpose of these negotiations...
[Eve Massingham, Simon McKenzie and Rain Liivoja are members of the Law and the Future of War Research Group at the University of Queensland Law School. The Research Group receives funding from the Australian Government through the Defence Cooperative Research Centre for Trusted Autonomous Systems. The views and opinions expressed in the article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government...
[Elke Schwarz is a Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen Mary University London and Researcher in ethics and technology. This post is part of our symposium on legal, operational, and ethical questions on the use of AI and machine learning in armed conflict.] Artificial Intelligence (AI) in armed conflict is often considered under the cluster of ‘emerging technologies’, but the concept and field of study has its origins...
[Nadia Marsan is Senior Assistant Legal Adviser in the NATO Office of Legal Affairs. The views expressed in this article are hers alone and do not necessarily represent the views of NATO or its Allies. This post is part of our symposium on legal, operational, and ethical questions on the use of AI and machine learning in armed conflict.] The ICRC, in its latest report on...
[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...