In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Protection of Civilians Symposium: Will an Improved Legal Framework Affect the Situation on the Ground?

07 Sep

[Ray Murphy is a Professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, National University of Ireland Galway. This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] Although there have been many pronouncements and reports on the need to protect civilians, it is debatable if this has translated into increased security on the ground. The emphasis seems...

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06 Sep

[Siobhán Wills is a Professor of Law at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] In 2014 the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services published an ‘evaluation of the implementation and results of Protection of Civilians mandates in United Nations peacekeeping operations’ which: noted a persistent pattern of peacekeeping operations...

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05 Sep

PassBlue published a very disturbing article yesterday about nominations for five vacant UN Special Rapporteur positions. According to the article, although the President of the Human Rights Council, South Korea's Choi Kyonglim, has endorsed four of the selection committee's five first choices, he has refused to endorse its first choice for Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Karim...

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05 Sep

[Ralph Mamiya is team leader for the Protection of Civilians Team in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations but writes here in a purely personal capacity, and the views expressed do not represent official positions of his Department or the United Nations.] The protection of civilians is both a well-established topic in international law and also a relatively new and controversial...

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05 Sep

This week, we are hosting a symposium on the Protection of Civilians, a volume recently published by Oxford University Press, edited by Haidi Willmot, United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Ralph Mamiya, team leader, Protections of Civilians at the United Nations' Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Scott Sheeran, Senior Lecturer, Director of the LLMs and MAs in International Human Rights, School of Law and Human Rights...

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05 Sep

The summer is coming to a close and so is our fourth annual Emerging Voices Symposium. We have featured fantastic posts from emerging scholars, practitioners and students over the course of the summer and a roundup follows of what it is that they have covered. Alexandra Hofer started our 2016 edition off with her post on assessing the role of the European Union...

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05 Sep

[Grazyna Baranowska is a Senior Researcher at the Poznań Human Rights Centre of the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.] The nature of enforced disappearances is that it affects whole families, rather than only the individuals who disappeared. While the majority of the forcibly disappeared are men, these disappearances have a strong economic, socials and psychological effects on the...

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04 Sep

Event The Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa is hosting a "Young Researchers Workshop on Terrorism and Belligerency" between September 7-19. Though this event is by invitation only, you can contact the organizer at bmichel@geo.haifa.ac.il; additionally, information about the streaming of the event can be found on the Minerva RLEC YouTube channel...

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29 Aug

[Amina Adanan is a PhD candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, NUI Galway.]  In common law and civil law legal systems it is the responsibility of the public prosecutor to determine whether the prosecution of an international crime is pursued. The level of this discretionary power and the considerations to be taken into account in making the...

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22 Aug

As regular readers know, although I'm opposed to academic BDS, I fully support its economic incarnation. Which is why I find stories like this both depressing and infuriating: “I have no problem with Jewish people or any other religion or different beliefs. But for personal reasons, you can’t ask me to shake the hand of anyone from this state, especially in front...

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18 Aug

[Dr Myriam Feinberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions, University of Haifa. The topic addressed in this blog post is based on her monograph Sovereignty in the Age of Global Terrorism – The Role of International Organisations published by Brill/Martinus Nijhoff in May 2016.] The attacks of 9/11 brought terrorism to the international stage. They...

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