Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
13 Apr Law and Ethics for Autonomous Weapon Systems
essence, HRW seeks to ban autonomous weapon systems, rooting a ban on autonomous lethal targeting per se in its interpretation of existing IHL while calling for new affirmative treaty law specifically to codify it. By contrast, DOD adopts a regulatory approach grounded in existing processes and law of weapons and weapons reviews. Michael Schmitt and Jeffrey Thurnher offer the basic legal position underlying DOD’s approach in a new article forthcoming in Harvard National Security Journal, “‘Out of the Loop’: Autonomous Weapon Systems and the Law of Armed Conflict.” They say...03 Jan Some Thoughts on Negotiating a Treaty on Autonomous Weapon Systems
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 Jul The Gaza Report’s Treatment of Warnings: A Response to Blank
Laurie Blank published a post yesterday at Lawfare entitled “The UN Gaza Report: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose.” The post accuses the Independent Commission of Inquiry’s report on Operation Protective Edge (“Gaza Report”) of “completely undermin[ing] the foundational notion of equal application of the law” with regard to three areas of IHL: warnings, civilian vs military objects, and compliance. None of Blank’s criticisms are convincing, but in this post I want to focus solely on her first topic, warnings. Here is what she says about the Commission’s discussion of...
29 Jun Compulsory Licensing for Crisis Management: Revisiting the EU’s Approach
[Pallavi Arora is a Legal Consultant (at the level of Assistant Professor) at the Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in New Delhi. She advises India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry on matters related to international trade and investment law.] Recently, the European Commission (hereinafter “Commission”) tabled its new pharmaceutical strategy aimed at balancing access and innovation through a string of proposals, like the introduction of a unitary supplementary protection certificate (SPC) and general reduction of regulatory data protection (RDP) from 10 to 8 years. However, the...
26 Sep Symposium on the ICJ Climate Change Advisory Opinion: What it Means for Seabed Mining for the Green Energy Transition (Part II)
[Digvijay Rewatkar is an LLM candidate at Harvard Law School and an international lawyer with seven years of experience. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the views of his affiliations. This post was drafted before he commenced his course at Harvard Law School.] Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the readers’ vantage point, the seabed mining industry is trying to establish itself as a complementary and, perhaps, an alternative source of minerals required for the green energy transition. To postulate the scale of resources,...
16 Apr Symposium on Confronting Colonial Objects: A Panopticon of Colonial Cultural Heritage Taking and Return
influence and shape the discourse for the years to come. So, how will debates further evolve in future if we follow Stahn’s approach to the topic? There are three main patterns that can be extracted from the book and its way of dealing with this challenging and contentious topic. These are the i) interdisciplinary dialogue and its fragmented integration into a normative argument; ii) micro-historical and object-oriented approaches in studying questions of taking and return, and iii) the embrace of ethics in complementation to law. Each point might provide enough...22 Apr Is the Mauritian COVID-19 vaccine rollout based on a human rights approach?
Tanveer Jeewa is the Legal and Communications Officer at the International Commission of Jurists, Africa Regional Programme. She works mainly on issues of international human rights law and constitutional law. She has recently completed her LLM in Public Law at the University of Cape Town and was previously a law clerk at the South African Constitutional Court for Justice Theron. During 2020, Mauritius was internationally hailed as a country with among the most effective COVID-19 responses. By June 2020, the strict lockdown imposed in Mauritius had been completely lifted and...
07 May Will ‘Investor-State Arbitration’ Survive the COVID-19 Crisis?
an investment court system with an appellate mechanism only where investor-State arbitration prevails at the ‘first instance’ (proposal by China), reforming the existing investor-state arbitration mechanism without a need for an investment court system (proposal by Russia). To summarize, above-discussed proposals reflect two distinct approaches, with some applying a mix of both. The first approach deals with reforming the existing ISDS setup while maintaining the principles of an ‘arbitration-based’ ruling system. It includes reforms such as the establishment of an advisory centre and a code of conduct for arbitrators. On...20 Dec LJIL Symposium: A Comment on Ambrus by Frederic Mégret
approach to groups remains in the case law of international criminal tribunals (most visibly in the attempt to define Genocide convention groups as stable and by birth, for example), that approach is at least a legal-objective approach, not a bio-scientific one. It aims to elicit the intention of the drafters, outdated as it may be, not to define groups once and for all. It is not the less wrong for it, but at least it is less suspect of sharing an awkward moment with the génocidaires. One could argue that...
20 Jan Optional but Unequal: Why a Sex-Based Turn and a New Optional Protocol Could Undermine the Global Fight Against Gender-Based Violence
...between the parties. Aside from Human Rights Treaty Bodies, this approach to treaty interpretation is well established in international law and has been applied across a range of international adjudicative bodies. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has described the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as a living instrument in its Advisory Opinion (para 130) capable of responding to new scientific knowledge and emerging environmental challenges. Similarly, the International Court of Justice has relied on evolutionary interpretation as part of the ordinary application...