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Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

09 Jul

[Sofia Stolk is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law and Public International Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam] When I had the privilege of collaborating with Marina on an exhibition and performance around art and international justice in The Hague in 2019, I witnessed how she theorizes, practices, and preaches art as an act of love. Her book is the culmination of years of thinking and doing art and international law. It is a wonderful invitation to re-imagining international justice through an aesthetic lens, or rather to...
09.07.25 | |

29 Jul

...weapon of war, massacres of women, men, and children, and mass displacements are characteristic of neocolonial armed conflicts in regions such as Amhara, Cabo Delgado, central Somalia, Khartoum, North Kivu, and Tigray. Our aim with this symposium is to foster a diverse dialogue that illuminates the connections between African and Palestinian liberation struggles, advancing our collective understanding and pursuit of justice and human dignity globally. The symposium is divided into two parts. Part I, which begins on 29 July 2024, opens with David Arita, who highlights the relevance of the...
29.07.24 | and |

16 May

...For racialised and gendered scholars, the emotional labour in simply being, let alone belonging, is punishing.  On the battlefield, we need allies, creativity, resilience, and, perhaps most of all, we need victories. This symposium is a victory. It was hard fought, with various intervening factors delaying its release and altering its appearance. I tip my hat to those who spoke and do not judge those who did not. I also acknowledge those who, out of fear of reprisals, withdrew their submissions at later stages. There is neither harm nor disappointment....
16.05.22 | |

14 Jun

The White House’s recent statement that it would begin supplying Syrian rebels with arms demonstrates how military assistance and intervention remain a choice of states rather than an obligation. Recent events confirm the arguments I make in a recent article The Choice to Protect: Rethinking Responsibility for Humanitarian Intervention. I am pleased to be guest blogging about this topic over the next few days and thank the editors at Opinio Juris for the opportunity. The comparison between the intervention in Libya and the foot dragging with respect to Syria should...
14.06.13 | |

19 Apr

Over at Vox, I have published an essay fleshing out the thoughts I first published here on the legality of the recent U.S. cruise missile attacks on Syria and the international reaction to it. President Donald Trump’s surprising decision to launch a cruise missile strike on Syria was sharply criticized by Russia as a “flagrant violation of international law.” While it might be tempting to dismiss this claim as mere Putinesque propaganda, on this question at least, Russia is almost certainly correct. In the view of most international lawyers, the...
19.04.17 | |

22 Apr

...Syria’s legal obligation (if any) to cooperate with the new tribunal. Presumably, Syria could be harboring the Harari assassins. But would it have to turn them over? Maybe, but not necessarily. I’ll have to think about this some more, but it is not obvious to me that the U.N. Security Council has the authority to require Syria to cooperate with an international tribunal investigating crimes that occurred in a third country. But maybe they do. In any case, it looks like we are all going to find out pretty soon....
22.04.06 | |

29 Sep

I will be back blogging regularly soon, but I want to call readers’ attention to a phenomenal new article at the Intercept by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain about how the US government has cynically manipulated public fears of terrorism in order to justify its bombing campaign in Syria. Recall that Samantha Power — the UN Ambassador formerly known as a progressive — invoked the scary spectre of the Khorasan Group in her letter to the Security Council concerning the US’s supposed right to bomb terrorists in Syria in “self-defence.”...
29.09.14 | |

07 Sep

As readers of the blog no doubt know, Syria is is one of seven states that have not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). (The others are Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea, and South Sudan.) To consider Syria’s use of chemical weapons as a rationale for attacking the country, the USG obviously needs to assume that the use of such weapons is prohibited by customary international law. I have no doubt that they are; after all, the CWC has been ratified by 96% of the world’s states, and nearly...
07.09.13 | |

21 Aug

used to threaten it, is a key part of the Bush Doctrine. It is fascinating, and telling, that there is no concern in President Obama’s comments, or in the article, about the tenuous international legal basis for such an action against Syria. Certainly, there would be no UNSC authorization in this case. And yet I doubt there will be much grousing about legality in the NYT or Washington Post if there was an intervention in Syria. Which suggests that there might be an emerging bipartisan consensus here in the US...
21.08.12 | |

07 May

Syria exhibit an increasing tendency amongst states to abandon gravity-based appeals. Instead, we are offered narrow exceptions in justification of UHI. These increasingly preference specific incidents, like the use of chemical weapons, above general assessments of the seriousness of the humanitarian crisis. The United Kingdom was the first of the three states that recently intervened in Syria to provide legal reasoning. The UK appears to have maintained its gravity-based justification of UHI. Its defense of the Syrian attack began in conformity with its 2013 rationale which based legality on: (i)...
07.05.18 | |

01 Apr

...for Palestine, whose primary object was the reconstitution of the Jewish national home in that territory. The Lausanne Treaty did not include provisions on Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia as these articles had become moot in the interim. France had been selected as Mandatory for Syria and Lebanon, and Great Britain the Mandatory for Mesopotamia, with the Mandates coming into force in September 1923. The draft Mandate for Palestine was submitted for League of Nation’s approval in December 1920, approved in July 1922, and came into force in September 1923. The...
01.04.24 | |

07 Dec

The U.S. government has been making all sorts of official and unofficial threats to act if the Syrian government uses chemical weapons in its ongoing civil war. (CBS News) Whether the U.S. enters the war in Syria appears to be up to the dictator Bashir al-Assad. On Monday, CBS News reported the Assad regime had given orders to prepare chemical weapons for possible use to put down the revolt that has been raging for more than a year and a half. President Obama said use of these weapons of mass...
07.12.12 | |