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

28 Mar

...conflict has affected the different constitutionally protected classes and give visibility to their harms without discrimination. Based on a mix of constitutional jurisprudence and Peace Agreement mandates, the Commission implements a territorial approach, a gender(-inclusive) approach, an ethnic approach, and a life course approach (referring to children, seniors, and youth as well as those living with disabilities). The work is carried out with psychosocial support and taking into account the regional differences, the latter of which is known as the territorial approach. The Commission has gone to great lengths to...
28.03.22 | |

05 Oct

[Dire Tladi is a Professor of International Law at the University of Pretoria.] Introduction I first met Harold Hongju Koh in 2009 at a retreat on the definition of the crime of aggression for the purposes of the Rome Statute just outside New York. From my first engagement with him, I immediately knew two things about the man. First, our approaches to international law were based on very different philosophies. Second, his intellectual grasp of the complexities of international law, and its interaction with policy considerations, was remarkable. It is...
05.10.18 | |

04 Mar

[Jeroen van den Boogaard is a legal counsel for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a lecturer in international humanitarian law at the University of Amsterdam. He writes this post in his personal capacity.] In the coming weeks, Opinio Juris will host a symposium on “Responsible Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict.” The purpose of the symposium is to examine the challenges in regulating autonomous weapons systems. There is no forum where challenges become more apparent than during the meetings of the GGE LAWS. The symposium takes...
04.03.24 | |

28 Jan

international law is constructed very differently than domestic law. It is not written down from above, as it were, but bubbles up from below. International law is created, but not always deliberately; it emerges, but not entirely randomly. It establishes the “rules of the game” of international relations but the rules are evolving and not always clear, and the process that gives rise to these rules is also changing—really co-evolving with the rules themselves. For all these reasons, international environmental law can be difficult to pin down. But it’s important,...
28.01.10 | |

12 Jul

[ John Hursh is a lawyer, writer, and researcher focusing on the use of force, human rights, and international humanitarian law. He served as Director of Research at the Stockton Center for International Law and Editor-in-Chief of International Law Studies at the U.S. Naval War College from 2017 to 2020.] “It can be difficult to write something interesting about something one agrees with.” So wrote Timothy Waters when reviewing Mark Drumbl’s excellent book Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (CUP, 2007). I find myself reaching the same conclusion after reading Chiara Redaelli’s also...
12.07.21 | |

03 Jan

over the extent to which there should be a tech-focus. This arguably calls for a departure from the standard CCW approach to weapons regulation. In a recent paper published by the Transnational Law Institute at King’s College London, I examine various ways to ensure that LAWS can be developed, deployed and used in compliance with international humanitarian law. Specifically in relation to development (at pages 40-48), I argue in favor of an approach modelled on the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). This imposes a strict and unambiguous ban in Article...
03.01.18 | |

02 Jul

[Alejandra Muñoz is an International Legal Advisor with a Colombian lawyers’ collective, ”Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo (CAJAR)’] In February this year, the long awaited first voluntary statement rendered by Colombian army general Mario Montoya Uribe before the country’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP) sparked a great deal of frustration and disappointment among victims. After refusing to speak entirely on the first day, his declarations on the second day not only failed to contribute in any manner to establishing the truth on the more than 2000 extrajudicial executions of...
02.07.20 | |

03 Oct

[Brian L. Cox is an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, a visiting scholar at Queen’s Law, and a retired U.S. Army judge advocate. This two-part post commemorating the five-year anniversary of the Kunduz strike is part of a larger cross-blog collaboration with Just Security, Lawfire and the Harvard International Law Journal Online. You can find links to the other posts below.] Part 1 of this post focuses on two main Opinio Juris posts that were published soon after the official Kunduz airstrike was released to the public...
03.10.20 | |

21 Jan

...— as Paul rightly does in his conclusion — that if the Majority did depart from the Ruto standard, it had every right to do so. Trial Chambers are bound by decisions of the Appeals Chamber; they are not bound by the decisions of other Trial Chambers. So, in the absence of an Appeals Chamber decision, there is nothing inherently wrong with one Trial Chamber taking a different approach than one of its predecessors. It might be a good idea for Trial Chambers to generally follow the approach taken by...
21.01.19 | |

08 Oct

illegality rule, but proposes a differentiated treatment as to the consequences of intervention. This logic might be somewhat closer to existing status quo of the law in terms of its approach. But it remains questionable whether it should be applied to the mix of justifications for strikes used in the Syrian context. 4. From ‘law-breaking’ to ‘lawmaking’ A final problem of Koh’s argument is his approach towards ‘lawmaking’. Syria may indeed provide a momentum for further ‘lawmaking’. But the fundamental question is whether such initiatives should focus on the framework...
08.10.13 | |

13 Sep

...particularized foundations. Another approach is to suggest that the positive law is an alternative foundation for a universal norm such as human dignity, in that positive law reflects principles grounded in fundamental rights. Under this approach, one can determine what is foundational by examining what is uniformly reflected in ordered societies. The existing legal architecture is an image of the philosophical foundations. A third approach, and one that I find particularly appealing at an abstract level, is what one participant described as the German theory of begründungsoffen, the idea that...
13.09.09 | |

08 May

Former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh spoke yesterday at the Oxford Union. His speech, “How to End the Forever War?” (link to .pdf) is a reflection on the Obama Administration’s foreign policy, in particular in regards to the rule of law. It is also a talk set to contrast the Obama Administration’s approach to international law and foreign policy from the Bush Administration’s. He opens in this way: Now that I have returned to the academy, I tend to hear three common misperceptions from friends on both the left...
08.05.13 | |