Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
21 Jul Symposium on Cyber, International Law and Artificial Intelligence in Armed Conflict: Law of Armed Conflict Implications of AI-Induced Fog of War
...Winston Churchill famously noted during World War II, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” And as recent conflicts have demonstrated, combat effectiveness, let alone battlefield survivability, depends increasingly on technology-driven deception, camouflage, and multispectral concealment. Absent effective countermeasures, in an age of sensor-soaked battlefields and data-centric warfare, forces can be “instantly detected, targeted, and destroyed” by traditional, and now AI-driven sensor systems. As Christian Brose, the Head of Strategy at Anduril Industries noted presciently several years ago: “in a world that...
24 Mar SCSL Symposium: A Brief Response to the Contributions on the SCSL’s Legal Legacy
...Special Court for Sierra Leone (Cambridge, 2020). I wish to take this opportunity to heartily thank these A-list of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners, who took time out of their busy schedules to read and comment on my work. The reviews, as posted during this online symposium over the past couple of weeks, moved from the (more) general to the (more) specific. Authors in the first group commented broadly on the book, and in several instances, also highlighted key issues of particular relevance (Prosecutor Stephen J. Rapp here and here, Mr....
08 Jul Customary International Law Symposium: Back to the Guillotine – Namely Hume’s Guillotine
[Martin Scheinin is a Professor of International Law and Human Rights at European University Institute and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism.] Professor Monica Hakimi’s article ’Making sense of customary international law’ is both rewarding and thought-provoking. It fully merits this Symposium. She makes a convincing case that most if not all mainstream doctrinal writing on the topic has serious flaws. She rightly criticizes what she calls the “rulebook conception” of customary international law and convincingly demonstrates that in everyday practice it does not really work like...
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...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...
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...
17 Apr ICC Prosecutor Symposium: “Mind the Gap”–Insights from Asia
This post looks at some of the issues and lessons that will impact the new prosecutor, emanating from the few situations related to Asia – a region that is often overlooked in the context of international justice. Other posts in our symposium have gone into details of the prosecutor’s position, responsibilities and qualifications. In this, I take a step back from the minutiae, and look at some of the larger conundrums that will face the new prosecutor, focusing on three aspects brought into sharp relief when viewing Asia and its...
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...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...