Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

States that do not have the veto, including those with rotational seats on the UNSC, have often urged the permanent members to refrain from vetoes in circumstances where grave international crimes are being committed. In addition, the General Assembly, the most representative UN organ, has sought more robust UNSC action when gross human rights violations are taking place. Probably the best example of this is the repeated efforts to secure referral of the Syria Situation to the ICC. Those measures, and other Syria-related resolutions, have been voted down on at...

[ Dr. Kubo Mačák is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.] Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria, announced characteristically through a Twitter post, has once again brought the ongoing hostilities in the Middle Eastern country into international spotlight. More than seven years into the conflict, its origins in a series of peaceful protests during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 seem now part of a distant past. Since then, the situation in Syria has undergone a number...

...and hunger and condemning the use of starvation as a method of warfare. On the occasion of this important anniversary, Global Rights Compliance (GRC) is privileged to host with Opinio Juris a digital symposium on the implementation of UNSC 2417. This will coincide with an expert webinar on 19 May 2021. Following an unprecedented year, conflict and hunger have been gravely exacerbated by COVID-19. There are more than 34 million people globally in IPC Phase 4 (Integrated Food Insecurity Phase Classification) who currently require urgent life-saving action and a further...

...on the theory one follows, if any. This week, Opinio Juris hosts a symposium dedicated to the relationship between soldier self-defense and international law, in the hope of capturing what soldier self-defense means for State armed forces and to encourage an accurate framing of this notion against the background of international law. *** In its most recent military operations, the U.S. has publicly relied on the notion of self-defense of its own forces or partner forces to justify the use of lethal force abroad. For instance, self-defense is regularly invoked...

[Tilman Rodenhäuser holds a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He is currently Legal Adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and worked previously with the German Red Cross, DCAF, and Geneva Call. The views expressed on this blog are those of the author alone and do not engage the ICRC, or previous employers, in any form. This post is the final contribution in our joint symposium with Armed Groups and International Law.] I feel truly honoured to see such rich...

[Dov Jacobs is the Senior Editor for Expert Blogging at the Leiden Journal of International Law and Assistant Professor of International Law at Leiden University] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-2 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. In the next couple of days, this second LJIL Symposium brings to you two exchanges on articles published in Vol 25(2) of the Leiden Journal of International Law, on Climate Change and Legal Pluralism. As recent discussions on...

...the usefulness of open source evidence, particularly material gathered from social media, for proving human rights violations. The roundtable also explored the role of social media companies in preventing, detecting and removing hate speech, and the avenues that are available to hold social media companies accountable for their role in the dissemination of such content. Amidst an increasingly global “techlash”, this symposium broadens the interrogative gaze beyond the specific context of Myanmar to examine accountability in the digital age more generally. Specifically, the symposium explores two core themes. The first...

...symposium should not be read as an additive process by which each blog contributes to one ideal conception of human rights accountability. Instead, it is a generative and reflexive exercise that produces new viewpoints on what accountability can be, challenging us to reimagine its very foundations across diverse contexts, and inviting those typically operating in the judicial realm to adopt a more encompassing perspective on accountability processes.  This blog is part of a seven-part symposium which was reviewed and edited by members of the IBOF Futureproofing human rights’ team: Tine...

— issue 10(2) — which contains a symposium feature, entitled ‘Climate Justice and International Environmental Law: Rethinking the North­–South Divide’. The symposium intends to analyse the intersections between law and emerging ideas of climate justice, and how international environmental law is shaped by and in turn reshapes (or fixates, or interrogates) our understandings of the North–South divide. As we state in the symposium’s Foreword: In focusing on ‘climate justice’, the symposium places questions of global equity and distributional justice at the core of international debates around climate change mitigation and...

...as a self-determination unit. In December 2015, the Security Council endorsed the Final Communiqué of the Action Group for Syria through Resolution 2254, reconfirming the legal or formal criteria of peoplehood; ‘the Syrian people [or the whole people of Syria] will decide the future of Syria’. The Syrian people encompass ‘[a]ll groups and segments of society’ (Final Communiqué) in the country. In actual international state practice, it has been outsiders who have decided who constitutes a people, not the peoples themselves. Groups have been designated as peoples on different territorial...

issue can be stressed strongly enough. As Jennifer notes, the letter explicitly calls for the UN to provide the Court with the funds it would need to investigate the Syria situation and to prosecute those it finds the most responsible for serious international crimes — something it failed to do with the Darfur and Libya referrals. (Mark Kersten has written endlessly and well about this.) I’d go farther than the letter: the Prosecutor should refuse to act on any Syria referral unless it is accompanied by the necessary funding. Although...

Last Friday, ASIL Insights published an article that I authored, “Legality of Intervention in Syria in Response to Chemical Weapon Attacks.” I followed it up yesterday was an expanded commentary at Lawfare, “Five Fundamental International Law Approaches to the Legality of a Syria Intervention.” A number of readers of the expanded Lawfare post queried me about remarks made near the end of that (lengthy) post concerning the role of the Security Council. Insofar as the disagreements about Syria are serious ones among the great powers, and among permanent five members...