Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
25 Apr The Violations of Sovereignty and the Right to Self-Determination in Rojava and Ukraine
...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...14 Jan A Few Thoughts on a Syria Referral
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...06 Sep Syria and the Role of the Security Council
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...04 Dec On the Legitimacy of the Settlements: A Legal and Historical Perspective
...during which they speak about Palestine as Southern Syria or the kingdom of Faisal. After Faisal is kicked out of Damascus, the next conference doesn’t speak about being part of Syria or the kingdom of Feisal. In the summer of 1920 the episode is finished. Again: You will not find anything similar before 1918 or after 1920. But feel free to back your claim 1 example. The evidence of the forged identity of the “Palestinian people” is overwhelming only to people that know little about it. To have some preliminary...27 Aug What’s So Terrible About Chemical Weapons?
it seems to me, is this: either the US believes in unilateral humanitarian intervention or it doesn’t. If it does, it should have been willing to use militarily force in Syria long ago, when tens of thousands of civilians were being indiscriminately slaughtered by the Syrian government. If it doesn’t, the fact that civilians are now being indiscriminately slaughtered by the Syrian government through the use of chemical weapons should be irrelevant. Murder by chemical weapons is terrible. But so is any kind of murder. As Walt says, “[d]ead is...17 Mar Ukraine Insta-Symposium: Intervention and Colonialism as Responses to Alleged Fascism
...The Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow-based think tank headed by former Politburo member Yuri Prokofiev, has explicitly drawn a parallel to Syria, noting that “the realization of a national radical project [in Ukraine] would have meant a second Syria, including acts of genocide, internal displacement, destruction of large industrial facilities, ripe with environmental and industrial disasters.” If the facts are relatively undisputed, why, then, have Russia and the West drawn such diametrically opposite normative assessments of the situation? First, Russia’s own well-documented efforts to stifle civil society have created a...
26 May 40 years’ Worth of Footage from Syria Alone: Global Documentation Requires Commensurate Global Justice
[Jeff Deutch, PhD, is Research Director at Mnemonic and co-founder of Syrian Archive. Libby McAvoy, Esq., is a legal fellow with Mnemonic and the Video as Evidence program at WITNESS.] Photo credit: Syrian Archive. Whether in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Hong Kong, Myanmar, the United States, Nigeria, Brasil, or elsewhere, over the last ten years civil society actors have produced and shared more content documenting human rights violations than ever before in human history. Encouraged by domestic courts and international accountability mechanisms, the ask to activists and human rights defenders is...08 May Charlie Dunlap’s Defence of Israel’s Attacks on Hezbollah in Syria
Last week, Asaf Lubin offered a compelling post at Just Security wondering why Israel’s repeated attacks on Hezbollah arms shipments in Syria have not received the same kind of jus ad bellum scrutiny as the US’s recent attack on a Syrian airfield. Today, Charles Dunlap provides his answer on the same blog: the Israeli attacks are clearly legal, so why would anyone scrutinise them? Here are the relevant paragraphs: [I]t appears to me that the Israeli strike sought to destroy weapons in transit before Hezbollah can burrow them into densely-populated...
27 Jul Holding Transnational Corporations Accountable for International Crimes in Syria: Update on the Developments in the Lafarge Case (Part II)
...for the financing of a terrorist enterprise in Syria. In this part II, the authors analyze the decision of the French Court rescinding the charge of complicity in crimes against humanity and shed light on the broader significance of the Lafarge case in the field of criminal corporate accountability. Interpreting complicity: The cornerstone of criminal corporate accountability for grave crimes ECCHR and Sherpa filed extensive briefings in conjunction with the legal complaint outlining, first, the international consensus affirming that the atrocities perpetrated by IS at the time amounted to crimes...