Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation

There is always a topic du jour in international law, a subject that defines a season of international law. Between the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it was the law of the sea. Between the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, it was international environmental law. Between the mid-1990s to present, it has been international criminal law. Every season is brought about by a major international negotiation, culminating in a conference (i.e., the Third Conference on the Law of the Sea, the Earth Summit, and the Rome conference), and the adoption of a...

international law. As one commenter observed, to refer to a particular state's laws (or values) to decide the content of international law is deny that international law is actually a true normative system at all. (The irrelevance of internal law to questions of state responsibility cannot be seen as a mere technicality.) Instead of asking whether the US is exceptional, one should ask whether the circumstances were exceptional such that norms sounding in international law - including self-defence, necessity, or force majeur - would preclude the wrongfulness of the act....

about whether the developing areas of international law are of any value or are desirable. The second group seems to always fall back on an answer relating to the existence of rules that seem desirable, ignoring effects: "Of course international law has had a positive impact. Look at all of these rules we have protecting human rights." 2) I am currently a student at a law school with a highly-regarded international law department, and spent a year abroad at a law school with a similarly highly-regarded international law department. At...

are attributable to a state vis-à-vis its occupation, wouldn’t the rules on state responsibility demand an end to the occupation? By qualifying a situation of occupation as unlawful, state responsibility entails increased obligations towards reversing the situation. The serious breaches only end by ending the occupation (i.e. the serious breaches wouldn’t occur sans the occupation). Would Israel be able to commit serious breaches of peremptory norms – annexation, denial of the right to self-determination, racial discrimination, and apartheid, amongst others, sans the occupation of Palestine? The simple answer is no. ...

[ Hüseyin Dişli is a PhD candidate at the University of Kent and convening Legal History and Legal Philosophy modules at Boğaziçi University Faculty of Law. He serves as a legal counsel to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC). Ömer Erkut Bulut is an Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University Faculty of Law in Istanbul, Türkiye. Hasan Basri Bülbül works as an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Boğaziçi University Faculty of Law in Istanbul, Türkiye. M Beheşti Aydoğan holds a PhD from the University of Warwick’s School of Law and...

minimum standard of treatment could be a pathway to this end. The time may be ripe for consolidating these trends so that human rights can be apprehended in their various facets. Let me now turn to international humanitarian law, which finds application in the context of an armed conflict or in a situation of occupation. Issues of investment law arose for example in the context of the Iraqi occupation, due to the contracts negotiated by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The law of military occupation is quite laconic with respect...

VCLT rules, interpretation in international law has rarely been regarded as a distinct (and broader) field of inquiry. As new insights on interpretation have abounded in other fields, international law and international lawyers have continually granted an imprimatur to rule-based formalism. Given that interpretation is a pervasive phenomenon in international law that is irreducible to analysis of the VCLT rules, a greater methodological awareness of interpretive theory and practice in international law is imperative. We convened a conference on interpretation in international law at the Lauterpacht Centre and the Faculty...

what happens under new conditions. Oh, those fools who think to know. It may indeed be, as Marina Veličković argues in conversation with Umut Özsu’s chapter, that the law itself would wither away. And if the law is so structurally fraught with violence, she contends, we might indeed do better without it—a point that resonates with Ratna Kapur’s argument about constrictive rather than emancipatory human rights. Which future lies beyond the law? While Veličković questions the possibility of emancipation through (international) law, Ntina Tzoulava amplifies chapters in the volume—especially those...

...of an armed conflict of international character – in other words, one that crosses the borders of the state – whether or not the place in which the armed conflict occurs is subject to belligerent occupation. This law constitutes a part of iue in bello. From the humanitarian perspective, it is part of international humanitarian law. That humanitarian law is the lex specialis which applies in the case of an armed conflict. When there is a gap (lacuna) in that law, it can be supplemented by human rights law This...

by inventing anything like a general rule of law, of whatever nature, to the effect that human rights cannot apply in armed conflict where they cannot be reconciled with the lex specialis of armed conflict. The derogation clause particularly of Article 15 ECHR is dead against this. It even acknowledges the existence of the laws of war in referring to 'deaths resulting from lawful acts of war', yet does not begin to subordinate the ECHR to that other body of law. Nor, of course, where the dicta of the ICJ...

Jordan Response... And what would be the Exec. attempted justification for the extraterritorial reach of a so-called "U.S. common law" that quite obviously could not be binding under customary laws of war or treaty-based laws of war or other customary or treaty-based law on the foeign accused? No jurisdiciton still. John C. Dehn Jens and Jordan, I have never finished the companion article to my JICJ article explaining the U.S. "common law" approach to punishing war crimes. However, Jordan is on track regarding the focus of the article -- which...

board with Roberts’ overall project, I am enough of a practicing lawyer to wonder whether comparative international law can allow us to assess right and wrong interpretations of international law, and whether government intervention should affect such judgments of even relative legal correctness. While I was sympathetic to the argument that the South China Sea arbitral tribunal lacked jurisdiction, I was (and remain) deeply skeptical of the subsequent Chinese argument that the arbitral tribunal’s award is not binding. I think this is not just a different approach to international law...