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Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

05 Feb

...the participants when the idea for this symposium materialized. Adding to this dept, commentators provided excellent reviews over the last week. In the following I seek to address some of their arguments being aware that exchange will continue beyond the symposium. Why are Emerging Powers not more radical? I am very grateful for Cai Congyan‘s remark that in his opinion my perspective departs from that of many Western scholars and instead of focusing on the threat emerging powers – and particularly China – may pose for a value-based international order,...
05.02.21 | |

10 Jul

[Marina Aksenova is an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Criminal Law at IE University] In this concluding post, I would like to offer a few observations on the themes raised by the participants of the symposium. Above all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the contributors for taking time to reflect on my book and offer their brilliant and innovative insights as well as to Kevin Heller and Opinio Juris team for generously hosting the symposium. The points I raise are not exhaustive but rather tentative...
10.07.25 | |

20 Aug

Opinio Juris is very pleased to host for the next few days an online symposium on Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s new book, Terror in the Balance recently published by Oxford University Press. The format for this symposium will be familiar to those who followed the symposium we held three weeks ago on Michael Ramsey’s book, The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs. We will begin with a few posts introducing the broad outlines of the book. We will then have comments from experts who will address various aspects of the...
20.08.07 | |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |

06 Nov

...Convention with those who did not sign it. And just when you think the argument’s over and they can’t make any more mistakes, Paul Clement offers up this: Now, the government says you can’t do that because that’s going to mess up what’s going on in Syria. With all due respect, I assume that the issue in Syria is whether or not the nation state of Syria is doing something that would violate the convention if, contrary to fact, they were a signatory to this convention.” (emphasis added) Well, as...
06.11.13 | |

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 | |