Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
19 Jun Symposium on the 1951 Refugee Convention at 75: With a Little Help from its Friends: the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees at 75
...States parties in fulfilling their obligations in applying the 1951 Convention, like every other treaty body issuing its views, such as the Human Rights Committee when it promulgates General Comments. As the Director of UNHCR’s Division of International Protection and Solutions has announced in her contribution to this Symposium on the 75th Anniversary of the 1951 Convention, UNHCR is now engaged in renewing the 1979 Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status (Handbook). After almost fifty years, the Handbook is still UNHCR’s authoritative and comprehensive interpretative guidance of...
23 Aug Symposium on Informers Up Close: Journeys – Engaging with Informers Up Close
...entire project. And now these themes indeed suffuse this symposium in that they resonate through the words of all four commentators Our book bobs and weaves between academic writing and journalistic exposition. Academic hangovers compel us to define and delimit. Halfway through the project, once the empirical research in the archives was complete, and our file-stories drafted, we hit a point of inflection. Should we just stop there? Should we simply publish the file-stories, with modest historical background to situate the reader in Communist Czechoslovakia, and leave the rest unspoken?...
25 Aug Rohingya Symposium: The Rohingya Cases before International Courts and the Crime of Genocide
[Melanie O’Brien is Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Western Australia, and Second Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.] As part of the Opinio Juris symposium, “The impact and implications of International law: Myanmar and the Rohingya”, this post looks at the potential impact and implications of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) cases on the crime of genocide. Is there anything specific about the Rohingya cases in these two courts that may in some way develop the definition of...09 Oct LJIL Symposium Vol 25-3: Wording in International Law: Not really a ‘hen house’: dynamics of competition amidst fears of oblivion
[ Francesco Messineo is a Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School, Canterbury (UK).] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Unless international lawyers get their act together and agree on the basic meaning of the key terms in their discipline, says Jean d’Aspremont, observers (and, crucially, funders) may suddenly realize that the profession is really no more than an ‘expensive debating club’ – often funded by the taxpayer – ‘in...04 Apr HILJ Online Symposium: Hague Peace Conference Courts v. The Universe of International Courts
[Karen J. Alter is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University. Alter’s most recent book is The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2014).] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Suzanne Katzenstein’s article is a very welcome systematic investigation of the Hague era and post-Cold War proposals to generate international courts (“ICs”). Katzenstein puts her finger on a serious problem in the...
15 Sep Transitional Justice Symposium: Giving Politics Its Due–Late Reflections on Ruti Teitel’s Transitional Justice
...ground’. For them, what Max Weber famously called an ‘ethics of responsibility’ – concerned with the consequences of political actions – was a crucial element of the real politics of transitional justice. Teitel’s work – and particularly the book to which this symposium is dedicated – belongs, I would argue, to this (sometimes forgotten) intellectual tradition. While firmly committed to ideals of justice and legality, Ruti’s work is characterised by a sense of political realism that unambiguously recognises and critically engages with the role of politics in constraining, enabling and...
10 May New Technologies Symposium: Concluding Thoughts
[William Boothby is an Adjunct Professor of Law at La Trobe University, Melbourne. This post is part of our New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace Symposium .] In New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace we recognise the existence of a linkage between the military and consumer uses of a number of pivotal emerging technologies and consider how the law will develop to regulate their application in those distinct spheres of application. The contributing authors laid before the readers factual material relating to the respective...29 May VJIL Symposium: Introducing Moral Judgments & International Crimes
[Andrew K. Woods is currently a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law/Opinio Juris Symposium, Volume 52, Issue 3. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Thank you very much to the Virginia Journal of International Law and Opinio Juris for hosting this online discussion on my recent VJIL Article, “Moral Judgments & International Crimes: The Disutility of Desert.” The international criminal regime exhibits many retributive features, but scholars and practitioners rarely defend the...
17 Sep Organizing Rebellion Symposium: A Multi-Faceted Study of Armed Groups and International Law
relevance of State failure in these scenarios. While I am open to the notion that armed groups may in exceptional circumstances have human rights obligations outside an armed conflict situation, I have taken the view that extra scrutiny will need to be given to the organisation requirement in these circumstances together with what I term the ‘international requirement’ (equivalent of the intensity requirement). It is for this reason that I continue to have difficulties with the finding of the COI in Syria in February 2012 that the Free Syrian Army...
30 May Futureproofing Human Rights Symposium: Insulting Language as Ground for Inadmissibility – Thin-Skinned Accountability?
...flaw: by adopting and publishing an inadmissibility decision detailing a complainant’s insults, it is the Court (or Commission) itself that publicizes the offensive remarks, which would otherwise remain out of public view in almost all instances. This lack of necessity is also underscored by the fact that human rights bodies could opt to simply strike the offending language, a power the European Court has included in its rules with respect to parties’ representatives. When rejecting a complaint because of offensive language, these mechanisms are declining to hold themselves and States...