Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
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...
05 Dec Russia’s Attack on Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital and the Role of Open Source Information in Building a Case for Legal Accountability
Surgical Hospital in Idlib, Syria, on 5 May 2019. Two brothers died as a result of the attack, and the lives of approximately 30 people working in and using the hospital were endangered. Attacks of this type were, and are, a common feature of the conflict in Syria, to the extent that the UN Security Council issued a resolution calling for the protection of medical facilities. These attacks are widely documented online, and Syrian documenters have filmed and shared extensive footage of attacks on hospitals and their aftermath. On 1...
27 Jul Sleight-of-Hand on Palestine at the League of Nations: How the alteration of a verb tense “legalized” Britain’s mandate
...the Palestine mandate on a consideration separate from that of title. France was refusing to allow the Council to deal with Britain’s claim until the Council would consider its claim to a mandate for Syria. The Syria mandate, however, was being delayed because Italy, another Council member, objected to certain provisions of the document France had drafted to govern Syria. A year earlier, the Council had said that the two mandates could take effect simultaneously once France and Italy came to agreement on the Syria mandate document. At the Council’s...07 Nov International Law and the U.S. Election: Trumpxit, Syria and State Marijuana Laws
...in Syria that doesn’t seem to clearly fit into the Geneva Convention’s categories for either international or non-international armed conflicts. On a domestic legal front, the US Congress has not specifically authorized the action in Syria as well, making its domestic legality questionable at the very least. The next President will have to decide how to frame the Syria conflict under international and US constitutional law. My guess is that both Clinton and Trump would follow the Obama approach of treating the conflict as a non-international armed conflict against the...
29 Sep On the Anvil: The Netherlands v. Syrian Arab Republic at the International Court of Justice?
to the International Criminal Court; and yet another relates to the critical role of fact-finding and evidence gathering, being undertaken by the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria and other actors. However, important as these are, I focus on the route that has been chosen by the Netherlands in this instance – that of the CAT and its potential application to the International Court of Justice. In its press statement, referencing a diplomatic note sent to the Syrian government, the Netherlands states: “The Netherlands has invoked Syria’s responsibility for...16 Nov Why It’s Not Surprising Syria Is Destroying Its Chemical Weapons
revulsion. So what’s his motivation? For reasons of his own, he must have decided that he was better off without chemical weapons than with them. Perhaps it has to do with the internal political situation in Syria. Or maybe Russia got fed up for some reason. But it’s a bit of a mystery, and not one that I’ve seen any plausible explanations for. I don’t think it’s a mystery at all. Here is the explanation: Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad have firmly seized the momentum in the country’s...13 Sep Does the Washington Post Editorial Page Have ANY Standards Left?
is required to bring some wars to an end. And yet there’s been little evidence of that sentiment in American opposition to missile strikes against military targets in Syria. Obama has specifically disclaimed any intention to end the Syrian civil war through military action. But whatever. Even after 1,400 Syrian civilians, including 400 children, were killed in a nerve gas attack that was in all likelihood carried out by government forces, the prospect of American military intervention has been met with a combination of short-sighted isolationism and reflex pacifism —...
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...