Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
14 Aug Ukraine and the Venice Commission: A Pattern of Mutual Influences over the Last Decade
while acknowledging that the reflection needs to be continued, not least in the light of the future experience in fighting oligarchic influence.” (Opinion CDL-AD(2023)018, para. 24) Furthermore, the Commission distinguished between two approaches to de-oligarchization: the “systemic” and the “personal” approaches. The systemic approach encompasses an array of legal tools in many fields of law, including antitrust, taxation, anti-monopoly to political parties, elections and media legislation. This is the approach currently favored by the Commission. The personal approach, by contrast, seeks to identify the people who are viewed as exerting...
13 Oct Critical Reading of Opening Preliminary Examinations in the ICC Independent Experts’ Review
and as a general rule, will follow a conservative approach in terms of deciding whether to open a preliminary examination”. Nevertheless, neither the Experts’ recommendation nor the OTP’s conservative approach to opening a PE appear consistent with the Prosecutor’s obligations under the Rome Statute. Article 15(2) of the Statute obliges the Prosecutor to analyze the seriousness of the information received. According to paragraph 6 of Article 15, this analysis constitutes the preliminary examination stage. Therefore, opening a preliminary examination to assess all information received is an obligation rather than an...21 Sep Book Discussion: A Principled Approach to State Failure by Chiara Giorgetti
We are very pleased to host from today through Friday an online symposium considering Chiara Giorgetti‘s book A Principled Approach to State Failure: International Community Actions in Emergency Situations (Brill 2010). Dr. Giorgetti, an attorney at White and Case and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center, will be with us for the rest of the week, discussing various of themes from her book. Moreover, we will also be joined by Gian Luca Burci, the Legal Counsel of the World Health Organization; Greg Fox of Wayne State University Law School;...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 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,...
29 Apr Beyond Containment – Confronting Racial Hierarchies in International Law: Intersections in Privilege and Marginalization
...each intersection with the same determination or take a static approach, international law runs the risk of focusing on an incomplete list, and in doing so inadvertently creating a hierarchy between ‘accepted’ and ‘overlooked’ intersections. International laws need for an intersectional approach Race is, self-evidently, a core system of oppression in the world today. However, a limited racial literacy within international law prevents us from seeing the vulnerabilities of a white homosexual woman, as her racial privilege obfuscates other intersections of oppression. Here lies the importance of intersectionality, which conceptually...28 Jan Barrett Commentary to “The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law”
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,...