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Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

10 Apr

[Jens David Ohlin is Associate Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School.] This post is part of our symposium on the latest issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I agree with almost everything in Darryl Robinson’s plea for a cosmopolitan liberal approach to international criminal justice. Robinson’s article sketches out the development of ICL scholarship, noting the beginnings of the field, followed by the liberal critique of early ICL development, and then the counter-critique...
10.04.13 | |

02 Oct

At Just Security today, my friend Harold Koh has mounted a typically masterful defense of the legality of unilateral humanitarian intervention (UHI) in Syria and other places. I wish all advocates of UHI were as thoughtful. Not surprisingly, though, I’m not convinced by Koh’s argument. Let me offer four (disconnected) thoughts on his claims below. A “per se illegal” rule would overlook many other pressing facts of great concern to international law that distinguish Syria from past cases: including the catastrophic humanitarian situation, the likelihood of future atrocities, the grievous...
02.10.13 | |

06 Apr

...a legal duty to prevent further genocide by Daesh against the Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims in Iraq and Syria. The question is whether the efforts made thus far have satisfied the due diligence standard. US- and Russian-led coalitions have been pounding Daesh with airstrikes since mid-2014; however, Daesh’s genocidal campaign continues. In addition, according to reports, other States within the region, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, have continued aiding and assisting radical groups in Iraq and Syria with arms and munitions despite the genocide against the Yazidis,...
06.04.16 | |

31 Aug

...‘Sources of International Law’ by exploring the debates about permanent sovereignty over natural resources and expropriation and this lends itself superbly to the TWAIL perspective (as does the text’s use of the Libya-Chad conflict as an introduction to the international legal system). Of course, critical teaching is contextual, and different methods will resonate with students inhabiting different lives. Thus, critical teaching in European countries for instance, will need different approaches and these have been developed in excellent initiatives in Kent and Warwick, for instance. The project of critical international law...
31.08.20 | |

24 Feb

At Wednesday’s debate, Mitt Romney claimed that one of the reasons Iran supports the Syrian government is that Syria is Iran’s “route to the sea.” Hmm: Where’s Syria? Oh, yeah, it’s off to the left — past Iraq. And what’s that funny blue thing to the south of Iran? Could it be… water? Take it away, Emily Heil at the Washington Post: “Iran has direct access to waterways, thank you very much, with some 1,520 miles of coastline along the Arabian Sea. It doesn’t even share a border with Syria,...
24.02.12 | |

23 Apr

[Beth Stephens is a Professor at Rutgers Law] As a late-arrival to this Insta-Symposium, I find that many of my thoughts about the Kiobel opinion have already been expressed. Corporate defendants won an important victory in Kiobel, at least for foreign corporations with no more than a “mere corporate presence” in the United States. I had not predicted that the justices would be unanimous in rejecting the ATS claims in this case. But in the most important aspect of the decision, I’m not surprised that we fell just one vote...
23.04.13 | |

18 Apr

[Dr. Alex Mills is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at University College London.] Although the Kiobel Court finds unanimously for the respondents, it is nevertheless predictably split (between the opinion of the Court, written by Chief Justice Roberts, and the concurrence led by Justice Breyer) when it comes to the reasons underlying that decision. One way of characterising this split is as a competition between two presumptions (as also noted previously by Anthony Colangelo and John H Knox in this ‘Insta-Symposium’). The first, the apparent foundation of the...
18.04.13 | |

30 Mar

Benjamin G. Davis One thing missing from his speech which I appreciate is any indication of what the Syrian dissidents want. There is a great emphasis on what we are doing to reassure all of us about what we are doing, but one question left unanswered is what the Syrians want us to do. We can then see whether this is feasible under international law and given the state of the UN Security Council. It would have been nice. As to the 9000 dead - it is very ironic to...
30.03.12 | |

10 Sep

Normally, we post our conference announcements weekly, but we just got word of one tomorrow that’s worth flagging. The British Institute of International and Comparative law (BIICL) will be holding a Rapid Response Seminar tomorrow, September 11, from 4-6 pm to discuss ‘Humanitarian Intervention, International Law and Syria’. As the title suggests, the conversation will discuss whether humanitarian intervention falls within the corpus of international law and, if so, whether it can be applied to the current Syrian situation. Robert McCorquodale (BIICL) will chair the panel, with scheduled speakers including...
10.09.13 | |

06 Feb

Sorry for the endless self-promotion, but I thought readers might be interested in the following episode of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, which includes a 30-minute panel on siege warfare in Syria that I participated in. It was quite a wide-ranging discussion, focusing less on international law than I expected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM8PwT9hz3c&feature=youtu.be As always, comments welcome! I hope readers don’t think I was too soft on either Assad or the UN…...
06.02.16 | |

14 Jun

...and militias as local counter-insurgents. The US provided support to a range Syrian nonstate armed groups, from select groups of the Free Syrian Army, to prolonged support to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria. In addition to such large-scale support, US Special Forces and intelligence agents have regularly turned to militias, clan forces, tribal groups, or nonstate (or questionably quasi-state) armed groups as auxiliary forces for global counter-terrorism missions. This has been prominent in Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Libya, but may also have taken place in any...
14.06.21 | |

27 Sep

[Elvina Pothelet is a Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva.] A few days ago, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Shane Reeves and Lieutenant Colonel Ward Narramore published a harsh criticism of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Syria for its “emphatic, and faulty, conclusion that the U.S. violated the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC)” in an airstrike that hit a religious complex in the village of Al-Jinah. The two authors challenge both the factual and the legal findings of the...
27.09.17 | |