Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
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...03 Sep Another Set of Syria Views on Huff Post
For those still following along, an interesting array of views on the Syria situation in a conversation this afternoon on HuffPost Live, including Michael Scharf, Jules Lobel, Eric Posner, and yours truly. Would that the link went back a bit farther, you could listen in on a lively Miley Cyrus debate as well....23 Aug Syria, Chemical Weapons, and the Incoherence of the VCLT
My friend Dapo Akande has a superb post at EJIL: Talk! discussing whether the ICC could prosecute the use of chemical weapons by the government in Syria. I agree almost entirely with Dapo’s analysis, but I do want to offer a couple of thoughts about his discussion of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: The argument that chemical weapons are not covered by Art. 8 is thus based on the removal of the explicit prohibition and the fact that it was thought that it would be the annex...
22 Nov Poor Yorick: Talmon on Trump and International Law
by the Security Council, the ICJ, and nearly every state in the world. (And indeed, in the past couple of days alone the US position has been condemned by the UN, the EU, Germany, and even BoJo’s United Kingdom.) The second example is the Trump administration’s decision to use combat troops to guard oilfields in eastern Syria. The idea that the US would seize oil belonging to Syria has rightfully been condemned as the war crime of pillage, with Gen. Barry McCaffrey almost breaking the internet by tweeting, “WHAT ARE...27 Sep Putting the Cart Before the Horse? Top Panel of International Criminal Law Experts Proposes “Extraordinary” Criminal Tribunal for Syria
...disadvantage to this approach? We would need a new Syrian government to set up and carry out this proposed statute. And to get that new Syrian government, would we have to promise some sort of immunity to the old Syrian government that committed all those horrible crimes we want to prosecute? I agree in part: I think such discussions should be informal and as much as possible under the radar if only because knowledge of same by the Syrian regime simply adds another complicating variable to eventual resolution of this...14 Nov MJIL Symposium: A Response to Spencer Zifcak by Ramesh Thakur
back in New York, there was an unbridgeable gap between effective civilian protection, which Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (‘BRICS’) supported, and regime change, which they strongly opposed. One important result of the gaps was a split in the international response to the worsening crisis in Syria. Both China and Russia, still smarting from the over-interpretation of Resolution 1973, have been defiantly opposed to any resolution that could set in train a sequence of events leading to a 1973-type authorisation for outside military operations in Syria. Fourthly, the...28 Aug Non-Syria News: Update on that Philippines-China Arbitration
I’ve been distracted the last few days by all this Syria stuff (and a nasty case of poison ivy), so I neglected to keep up with the latest on that Philippines-China UNCLOS arbitration now seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Luckily, Luke Petersen of Investment Arbitration Reporter is on the case and has this great post analyzing the information released so far about the arbitration. Note that the Philippines has until March 2014 to file their memorial. This seems ridiculously long given that they’ve been preparing...16 Feb Weekly News Wrap: Tuesday, February 16, 2016
...Documenting war and harsh reality of life, some Syrian media outlets are now based in Turkey informing those back home. For the past week, Turkish military forces have been shelling targets in northern Syria held by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, the armed wing of the Syrian Democratic Union Party, a group designated by Turkey as a terrorist organisation, leading to speculation about “ethnic cleansing.” Asia U.S. President Barack Obama and allies from Southeast Asia will turn their attention to China on Tuesday on the second day of a...
12 Jul Book Symposium on Intervention in Civil Wars: Effectiveness, Legitimacy and Human Rights
This week, we are excited to host a symposium on Chiara Redaelli’s Intervention in Civil Wars: Effectiveness, Legitimacy and Human Rights. Scholars and practitioners who will be contributing include: John Hursh, Brad Roth, Luca Ferro, Erin Pobjie, Laura Iñigo and our own Alonso Gurmendi and will close with a rejoinder from Chiara herself From the publisher: This book investigates the extent to which traditional international law regulating foreign interventions in internal conflicts has been affected by the human rights paradigm. Since the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations,...
08 May New Technologies Symposium: Human Enhancement Technologies and the Law in War and Peace
[ Rain Liivoja is an Associate Professor in the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland. He is currently a Visiting Scholar with the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. This post is part of our New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace Symposium ] The interest of armed forces in emerging technologies sustains a lively normative debate. One might say that, at least in the law of armed conflict scholarship, technology is the flavour of the...