Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
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...
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...08 May Dr. Mohamed Helal’s Defense of Russia’s Syria Vetoes & Power Politics – A Rejoinder to His Criticism of My Post
he claims that, in relationship to the situation in Syria, the Permanent Members “have exercised the veto exactly as anticipated when the UN Charter was negotiated.” In fact, current practice is far removed from the substance of the 1945 negotiations. Examining each of Russia’s 12 vetoes (sometimes joined by China) related to Syria, we see vetoes of resolutions to: (1) condemn continued widespread and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms (draft resolution S/2011/612); (2) condemn bombing and shelling of population centers and condemn the detention of thousands in...21 Oct Turkey’s Operation “Peace Spring” and International Law
[ Vito Todeschini is an Associate Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists’ MENA Programme] On 9 October 2019, Turkey launched operation “Peace Spring” in the territory known as Rojava, in north-east Syria. The operation aimed at driving the Kurdish-led People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) out of a number of towns close to the Turkish border and to create a “safe zone” where to resettle Syrian refugees. After days of fighting, a United States-brokered ceasefire has temporarily halted major hostilities in view of the evacuation...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...