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07 May Jus Post Bellum Symposium: The Norm of Environmental Integrity in Post-Conflict Legal Regimes
covering several hundred square kilometres, or ‘long-lasting’, defined as having a duration of several months or about a season, especially since in the assessment of such effects there would always be a large subjective element.” The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has criticized it as both too stringent and too imprecise; the ICRC would also apply a different standard. The UN Compensation Commission, operating under Security Council Resolution 687 and in a context where the respondent was not a party to the treaties, declined to apply “widespread, long-term and/or severe” as...08 May Jus Post Bellum Symposium: In Defense of a Central Role for Sovereignty in the Jus Post Bellum Conversation
might seem like an obvious point to make, but it does appear to be forgotten in a lot, if not most of discussions on jus post bellum. This is illustrated in discourse and policy, for example, in what is, in my opinion, the over-emphasis on the role of civil society in providing basic social services, which should clearly be noted to be a short term solution, rather than a serious long term alternative to state institutions. There is one challenge to my claim that sovereignty-related issues are underappreciated that I...17 Jan Unprivileged Belligerents (Or Illegal Combatants)
further into these arguments, I understood that in part this arose from journalists, lawyers unfamiliar with the law of war, and others who mistakenly believed that the law of war existed in total in the four Geneva Conventions, and perhaps Protocol I. So, for example, an editorial in the Economist a couple of years back announced breathlessly, if ill advisedly, that the terms “unprivileged belligerent” or “illegal combatant” were nowhere to be found in the four Geneva Conventions: well, neither are the term “war criminal” or “war crime,” but of...
05 Feb International Economic Law Symposium: Response by the Author
[Andreas Buser is a senior research assistant at Freie Universität Berlin and lecturer of international economic law at the Institute of International Law, Intellectual Property and Technology Law at TU Dresden in summer 2021. He is affiliated with the KFG-Research Group “The Rule of International Law – Rise or Decline” and serves as a co-investigator within the Berlin-Glasgow research project on “The Law of Protracted Conflict: Bridging the Humanitarian- Development Divide” .] Academic fulfilment is at its largest when writing is not an end in itself but encourages others to...
25 Jul The Role of the IACHR in Hormonal Treatments for Minors: An Urgent Call for Caution
...implications for vital issues such as safeguarding, participation and consent by children, and sex education. Measures that I find particularly concerning include reprisals such as censorship, legal harassment, (…) removal from social media platforms, speaking engagements and the refusal to publish research conclusions and articles.” The Special Rapporteur’s statements are not only significant in terms of their content but also because they highlight that international law has not yet settled on the best and most legitimate responses to this highly complex social issue. Therefore, a call for prudence: it is...
08 Nov Belgium Set to Criminalise Ecocide (Kinda Sorta)
...echoing Art. 55 of the First Additional Protocol and Art. 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute, the Belgian definition requires an act to cause “serious, widespread and long-term” environmental damage. The IEP definition, by contrast, follows ENMOD and requires only that an act cause “severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment.” The actus reus of the Belgian definition is thus much more difficult to satisfy than the actus reus of the IEP definition, excluding serious environmental damage that is either widespread or long-term but not both. Indeed, in...13 May Who Needs International Lawyers When We Have Ilya Somin? (Updated Again)
Constitutional representative democracy. Mihai Martoiu Ticu His substantive argument is as follows: Premise 1: Ilya Somin is U.S. citizen. Premise 2: Whatever U.S. says goes. There are no international courts necessary to prove any American legal argument. Conclusion: Ilya Somin is right. QED Ian You might have also "overlooked", that Somin has made another groundbreaking discovery: The term "war" as a legally meaningful distinction from the term "armed conflict". The textbooks of 101 IHL might have to be rewritten! Along Somin, armed conflict generally doesn't trigger legality for target killing...
07 Oct On the Interpretability of Customary International Law: A Response to Nina Mileva and Marina Fortuna
is the act by which a legal norm is identified; content determination consists in defining the meaning of this norm. Even if they are often intermingled and complementary in practice, these two operations are conceptually distinct. Importantly, the entanglement of law ascertainment and content determination in practice does not allow us to conclude that CIL cannot be interpreted. Law ascertainment and content determination go hand in hand, yes, but interpretation is always necessary. Two interpreters may agree about the existence of a norm of CIL on a specific matter, but...22 Jan Guest Post: Ghodoosi–Comprehensive Solution to an Agreement: How the New Iran Deal Is Framed Under Iranian Law?
...Resolutions on the Iran Nuclear Program and will create tit-for-tat commitments on both sides. Whether the agreements reached thus far create binding obligations under international law is beyond the scope of this piece and requires further details on the recent –yet unpublished – implementation agreement. However, the drafters of the agreement of Nov. 24th deftly avoided the term “agreement” and instead employed the term “comprehensive solution”. This choice of term might have been to avoid the formalities of treaty law internationally but also domestically vis-à-vis Iran. Naming might make a...