Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

[Kevin Jon Heller is currently Associate Professor & Reader at Melbourne Law School.] This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 45, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Jenia’s excellent article. I always learn from her scholarship, and this article is no exception. That said, I find myself in an unusual quandary. When asked to critique an article, I normally take issue with its substance. There is...

The Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL), one of the world’s leading journals of international and comparative law, is pleased to continue its partnership with Opinio Juris in this second online symposium. This week, we will be featuring two Articles published by YJIL in Vol. 33-2, both of which are available here . Thank you to Peggy McGuinness and the other moderators of Opinio Juris for hosting this discussion! Today, Monica Hakimi (University of Michigan Law School) will discuss her Article, International Standards for Detaining Terrorism Suspects: Moving Beyond the...

...this out because—with the exception of Richard’s kind and detailed approbation of the historical analysis—the commentaries in this symposium understandably engage less with the particulars of the history than with its doctrinal implications for contemporary interpretive practice. So here is a sketch of the case for those implications: First: Every mainstream understanding of treaty interpretation contemplates the use of travaux to resolve ambiguity that remains after the methods described in Article 31 are applied. We argue about the use of travaux in other circumstances. But no one seriously contests that...

...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...

[Jonathan Baron is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.] 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 to the Virginia Journal of International Law for inviting me to participate and to Opinio Juris for hosting this discussion. I found this Article to be interesting and informative. It all makes sense to me, and I have no major criticisms. I would like to mention a...

...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...

I commend Katerina Linos’ book to our readers and echo the many positive comments that others in this book symposium have shared. Her theory of bottom-up democratic diffusion of norms addresses many of the concerns that have been voiced regarding the democracy deficit that occurs when policy elites borrow from abroad. I want to push Katerina a bit on the question of actors involved in the diffusion process. She notes that “many academics, judges and commentators emphasize how references to foreign law reflect elite predilections antithetical to the views of...

[Armin von Bogdandy is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Ingo Venzke is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, University of Amsterdam.] 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. We are truly grateful to Andreas Føllesdal and Ruti Teitel for their perceptive comments on our article, On the Functions of International...

[Claire Kelly is a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law Symposium, Volume 52, Issues 1 and 2. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Thank you very much to Opinio Juris for this opportunity to comment on this set of Articles recently published in the Virginia Journal of International Law. To address rationalism’s failings, Professor Cho prescribes a constructivist or sociological lens in his Article, “Beyond Rationality: A Sociological Construction of the...

[ Kelisiana Thynne is a Legal Adviser in the Advisory Services on IHL, Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) . This is a post in our joint blog symposium exploring the new ICRC Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention (GCIII Commentary) ]. Respecting the Conventions in case of an armed conflict regularly presupposes that preparations have been made in advance (ICRC 2020 Commentary to GCIII, (all paragraph references in the blog are to this Commentary), para 178) [O]bligations in the Conventions may best be implemented during...

...and affected me personally.  The University of Southampton  In the summer of 2014, I recall seeing notice for a conference at the University of Southampton School of Law scheduled for April 2015. The conference was the brainchild of Oren Ben-Dor, an Israeli law professor based at Southampton University and was co-organised with George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American law professor based at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. (Coincidentally, George is also a contributor to this symposium). The call for papers was considered controversial at the time because it...