Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
24 Feb Mitt Romney Is Learning Geography from Fox News
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,...23 Apr Kiobel Insta-Symposium: Closing Avenues for Relief
[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...18 Apr Kiobel Insta-Symposium: A Tale of Two Presumptions
[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...03 Sep A “Munich Moment” in Syria?
Yes, according to Secretary of State John Kerry: Secretary of State John Kerry told House Democrats that the United States faced a “Munich moment” in deciding whether to respond to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. In a 70-minute conference call on Monday afternoon, Kerry derided Syrian President Bashar Assad as a “two-bit dictator” who will “continue to act with impunity,” and he urged lawmakers to back President Barack Obama’s plan for “limited, narrow” strikes against the Assad regime, Democratic sources on the call said. Kerry’s...06 Feb Al Jazeera Panel Discussion on Siege Warfare in Syria
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…...31 Jan The CIA Violated the Terrorist Bombing Convention
...self-defense against the non-state actor who is DPAA are not measures against the territorial state. Kevin Jon Heller The next time Syria uses a chemical weapon to defend itself against an armed attack, I look forward to your argument that Syria's "inherent right of self-defence" has "primacy" over its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention. Xavier @ Jordan: Would you apply the standard that you are invoking in your comment universally? For example, it is well known that CIA backed terrorists have organized attacks against Cuba from South Florida. One...14 Jun What do Appropriate Due Diligence Measures for Nonstate and Substate Partners Look Like? Part I: Outlining Partnership Patterns and the Legal Debate
...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...27 Sep The Law Applied by the UN Syria Commission to the Al-Jinah Strike is Correct – And Reflects US Doctrine: A Reply to LTC Reeves and Narramore
[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...