Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
15 Apr Like David Hicks, the Australian ‘Shamima Begum’ Should Issue a Writ for Habeas Corpus
...to Bangladeshi nationality. The Background Bangladesh is entirely foreign to Shamima who is London-born. Yet by the age of 20 she has lost her 3 children and her British nationality. She travelled to Syria in 2015 at the age of just 15, beguiled to be an ISIL bride. After the collapse of the ISIL State she was detained in the Al-Hawl camp in north-east Syria under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Front. Her two elder children had died sometime earlier and her third, a son born in the...
23 Apr Symposium: R2P as an “Umbrella Norm”
...which Russia and China vetoed resolution after resolution that would have aided the Syrian people. Both Russia and China argued that each resolution they vetoed was biased against the Syrian regime and would open the door to military intervention and regime change. However, through detailed analysis Nahlawi shows that this was false. The UNSC resolutions did not authorize the use of force, and instead outlined non-military measures, or referrals to the ICC. She rightly accuses Russia and China of being bad actors in these vetoes, abusing their power in bad...
16 Oct The Trump Administration and International Law: A Reply
[Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.] I have been educated by the thoughtful symposium on my new book, The Trump Administration and International Law (Oxford University Press 2018). I am grateful to the committed colleagues who contributed to this Symposium for enlightening me, and deepening my understanding. I especially thank my kind friend Kevin Jon Heller for graciously hosting...
16 Jun Migrants and Justice Remittances: How the Movement of People Across Borders is Enabling the Spread of Universal Jurisdiction Cases
...crime, a private citizen or certain nongovernmental organizations to be a party in the criminal process together with, or instead of, public prosecutors. To see these causal pathways in action, consider the three recent cases in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Anwar Raslan — a former security official in Syrian President Bashir al-Assad’s regime — fled Syria shortly after the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War and ultimately settled in Germany in 2014. During this same period, Syrian migrants in Germany organized to promote prosecutions. They created their own nongovernmental...28 Sep Weekly News Wrap: Monday, September 28, 2015
...least two military installations in air strikes in neighbouring Syria, according to the Israeli military. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that any attempts to overthrow the government in Syria could lead to a failed state like Iraq or Libya. Seventeen Syrian refugees, including five children, have drowned after their boat sank in Turkish waters on its way to Greece, according to local media reports. Asia Japan, which accepted just 11 asylum seekers out of 5,000 applications last year, will provide about $810 million in aid in response to refugees...30 Jul Is the UK’s Abolitionist Stance Against the Death Penalty Still Absolute?
carry the death penalty.” However, Kotey and Elsheikh are not subject to this specific protection because as they were captured in Syria by US-backed forces they are not being extradited from the UK nor from the authority of the UK in Syria, which would come under the State’s (extra-territorial) jurisdiction and engage the UK’s obligations under the ECHR (Sanchez Ramirez v France, Al-Saadoon and Mufdhi v the United Kingdom, and Al-Skeini and Others v the United Kingdom). The UK’s strategy for the abolition of the death penalty lists the US...16 Oct Jens Iverson Guest Post: The New Haven School on Syria–Observing Professors Koh and Stahn
[ Jens Iverson is a Researcher for the ‘Jus Post Bellum’ project at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, part of the Law Faculty of the University of Leiden.] The debate on the legality of a U.S. strike in Syrian territory is unlikely to produce consensus, in part because those involved in the debate take fundamentally different approaches to international law. Unless the underlying commitments of each approach are brought to the foreground, contributors to the debate risk talking past each other. As a result, an important opportunity will...
14 Jul Intervention in Civil Wars Symposium: Representatives of their Own Peoples–From National Liberation Movements to Opposition Groups
...194). Both in Libya and Syria, the repression of peaceful demonstrations led to the emergence of internal conflicts involving violent clashes between the government and several opposition groups. As explained by Redaelli, the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Libya and the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) in Syria were recognised by several states as the legitimate representatives of the people of these states. In particular, she indicates that there is a difference between recognising rebels as the legitimate representatives of their peoples and recognising them as a new government, being the...
31 Jan Hanging Hippocrates: Criminal Doctors from Nuremberg to Homs
[Merlina Herbach holds an LLM in International Law from the University of Edinburgh, has worked at the International Nuremberg Principles Academy and is currently a Legal Fellow with the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC).] A medical doctor practicing in Germany was discovered to have tortured his patients in Syria at the behest of the Syrian government, turning his back on that most sacred of oaths taken by all doctors, the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. The allegations against the former Syrian doctor, Alaa M., whose trial is to...22 Dec Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War
Scientific American has published an article by John Wendle on how climate change has spurred the conflict in Syria. Wendle writes: Climatologists say Syria is a grim preview of what could be in store for the larger Middle East, the Mediterranean and other parts of the world. The drought, they maintain, was exacerbated by climate change. The Fertile Crescent—the birthplace of agriculture some 12,000 years ago—is drying out. Syria’s drought has destroyed crops, killed livestock and displaced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers. In the process, it touched off...