Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
12 Apr The Apartheid Reports: A Paradigm Shift on Israel/Palestine (Part I)
various types of protest and resistance, such as in the laws known as the “Anti-Boycott Law” and the “Nakba Law.” The process culminated in Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People, which as a basic law forms part of the future Israeli Constitution (known as the “Nation State Law”). This Law is mentioned in all the apartheid reports and encouraged the consideration of the status Palestinian citizens in Israel as part of the apartheid framework, beyond the occupation framework. The Nation State Law declared that the...
08 Oct Training Armed Forces in IHL: Just a Matter of Law?
[Altea Rossi is Programme Officer with the Security and Law Programme at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) and serves as Deputy Member to the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission).] As a matter of treaty and customary law, international humanitarian law (IHL) requires states to instruct their armed forces on the norms applicable to armed conflicts. To adhere to this obligation, states have established mechanisms to integrate IHL into their military training. Despite its inherently legal nature, should effective IHL training be all about the law?...05 Mar Square Pegs and Round Holes: Individuals and the FSIA
international law.” It would certainly be preferable for courts to apply a set of guiding principles, rather than waiting indefinitely for a response from the Executive. Such guiding principles can be and have been found in customary international law incorporated as federal common law and/or in relevant treaties, as discussed in the amicus curiae brief of Professors of Public International Law and Comparative Law, which I authored. Some of these are quite straightforward, such as the customary immunity from proceedings in any foreign national court afforded to sitting heads of...16 Nov Responsibility of International Organizations – The Problem of Attribution
the functions of its organs and agents is borrowed from the ILC’s widely praised Articles on State Responsibility. But a distinction between internal and external law for IOs is quite unlike the the national/international law division used for the state responsibility rules. What is the “internal” law of an IO but another species of international law? IO internal law usually derives from its constitutive treaty. The meaning, status and viability of those treaties, like all treaties, is a matter of international law. Most importantly, a treaty may be overridden by...
20 Apr Book Symposium: The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria
upon diverse legal frameworks – including the laws of the UN, laws of international organisations, human rights law, humanitarian law, criminal law, environmental law, and laws of State responsibility – to extract conclusions regarding existing and emerging host and third-State obligations to prevent and react to mass atrocity crimes. It uses this legal grounding to critically examine specific aspects of the Libyan and Syrian R2P cases, engaging with some of the more traditional debates surrounding R2P’s application, most notably those that pertain to the use of force (or lack thereof),...
31 Aug Symposium on Myanmar and International Indifference: Rethinking Accountability – Centering Accountability in Asia: Universal Jurisdiction, Grave Breaches, and Cautious Optimism
(at 127). If these distinctions are no longer relevant and customary international law applies, then an examination of enabling legal frameworks turns from examining grave breaches to how the forum State applies customary international law domestically—and whether there is appetite and existing precedent to use this for the prosecution of non-international armed conflict war crimes. Notably, there has been at least some domestic judicial recognition of customary international law regarding grave breaches applicability to NIAC. Further, any relevance of customary international law in domestic forum States without Rome Statute ratification...
10 May New Technologies Symposium: Concluding Thoughts
[William Boothby is an Adjunct Professor of Law at La Trobe University, Melbourne. This post is part of our New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace Symposium .] In New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace we recognise the existence of a linkage between the military and consumer uses of a number of pivotal emerging technologies and consider how the law will develop to regulate their application in those distinct spheres of application. The contributing authors laid before the readers factual material relating to the respective...
15 Sep Transitional Justice Symposium: Giving Politics Its Due–Late Reflections on Ruti Teitel’s Transitional Justice
[Frank Haldemann is Co-Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Transitional Justice, Human Rights and the Rule of Law at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] I first met Ruti in 2006, when I was a Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University of Law. For many of us working on transitional justice in these still early days, Ruti’s book Transitional Justice represented the ultimate reference point for any serious discussion about the topic. I was of course thrilled when she kindly accepted to comment...09 Oct LJIL Symposium Vol 25-3: Wording in International Law: Not really a ‘hen house’: dynamics of competition amidst fears of oblivion
[ Francesco Messineo is a Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School, Canterbury (UK).] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Unless international lawyers get their act together and agree on the basic meaning of the key terms in their discipline, says Jean d’Aspremont, observers (and, crucially, funders) may suddenly realize that the profession is really no more than an ‘expensive debating club’ – often funded by the taxpayer – ‘in...
20 Apr Symposium: The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria–Introductory Post
[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 UK and wider Europe. Despite the flagrant international law violations committed within the conflict that amounted to mass atrocity crimes, and despite the...