Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

...been awarded the world’s most prestigious refugee prize, the Nansen Refugee Prize, according to the UNHCR. The United States is set seize control of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper prosecutors claim is secretly owned by Iran, the US justice department said, though the ruling is to be appealed. The five permanent UN Security Council members have begun talks on a Western-drafted UN Security Council resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. Foreign Policy has a piece about why none of the current plans about intervention in Syria is actually about saving civilians....

...Minister Netanyahu was quick to respond that the letter did not represent an official government position. Jurist covers Russia’s admission into the WTO yesterday. The African Union and Senegal have reached an agreement about creating a tribunal to try former Chadian president Hissene Habre, accused of war crimes. “Foreign fighters” have joined the rebel forces in Syria, some of whom have alleged ties to al-Qaeda. In a phone call, President Obama and UK PM Cameron have agreed that the use or threat of chemical weapons in Syria would be unacceptable....

...receive him.” Had Judge Jacobs, who wrote for the majority, bothered himself a bit with the record, he would have discovered that Canada confirmed it was willing to accept him home. Moreover, this is hardly a trivial error. The gravity of the government misconduct in this case comes from the decision to send Arar to Syria when he could have been returned to Canada, sent to Switzerland, or back to Tunisia, where he had been vacationing. He was sent to Syria for a reason, and that was torture. Read Horton....

[ Eian Katz is Counsel and Program Manager at Public International Law and Policy Group. Opinions expressed here are his own. ] Recent allegations that Turkey has prevented humanitarian aid from reaching Nagorno-Karabakh mark the latest instance of a disturbing trend in global conflicts. In recent months, belligerent actors have engaged in similar acts of obstructionism in Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen to dire humanitarian effect. The abject politicization of aid delivery flouts the purported “right to humanitarian assistance” and necessitates a more forceful and coherent international response. Sovereign Consent Under international...

As a second boat of refugees in less than a week sinks on its way from Indonesia to Australia’s Christmas Island, Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard wants to revive an earlier plan to have refugees processed in Malaysia in exchange for the acceptance of genuine refugees. Syria’s President Assad has claimed that his country is in a state of war. Notwithstanding the recent wave of defections, US intelligence reveals that Assad’s inner circle is still intact. Senior UN diplomats are convening a meeting of world leaders on Syria for this...

...list’, in theory, does not create clear problems for IHL.  That said, this is far from simple when several states are involved, and various sources of intelligence are being collated. A recent example of this, and of the challenge of being the intelligence source to start the targeting cycle, is found in 2016 over Syria. In conducting airstrikes near Deir ez-Zor, coalition forces mistakenly targeted what were referred to as: “forces aligned with the government of Syria.” This strike involved aircraft from Denmark, Australia, the UK and the US, with...

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Burundi’s parliamentary elections on Monday were not fair or free and human rights were violated, the United Nations said on Thursday. Middle East and Northern Africa US President Barack Obama has said that the US-led coalition battling fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was “intensifying” its campaign against the armed group’s base in Syria. A suicide bomber from Syria’s al-Qaeda offshoot – the Nusra Front – has blown himself up...

...on Saturday as a U.N. envoy warned of chaos if divided lawmakers did not make progress on Sunday towards naming a government. Europe must open its doors to more Syrian refugees, having welcomed only a “miniscule” number while Syria’s neighbors have reached “saturation point”, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday appointed veteran U.N. official Staffan de Mistura, a former U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq, to replace Lakhdar Brahimi as the international mediator seeking an end to Syria’s civil war....

The United Nations Secretary General’s fifth Report on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was released last week. This Report is titled “State Responsibility and Prevention” and focuses generally on governance mechanisms and early warning. It also mentions the situation in Syria, stating that “[r]ecent events, including in the Syrian Arab Republic, underline the vital importance of early action to prevent atrocity crimes and the terrible consequences when prevention fails.” On the whole, the Report is consistent with prior work, but doesn’t contain much that is new. The Report focuses in...

[Christian Durisch Acosta holds a MAS in International Law of Armed Conflict (Geneva Academy) and has worked with several UN organisations (OHCHR in Honduras, UNAIDS in Mozambique, OCHA in Burkina Faso).] On 6 December 2019, the Rome Statute was amended as to include the intentional starvation of civilians as a war crime in non-international armed conflict. Up to then, it only figured as a war crime in international armed conflicts. Undoubtedly, this significant development was spurred by the horrific accounts on siege-induced mass starvation in Syria and Yemen. The second...

As UN monitors left Syria, fighting progressed to suburbs of Damascus. US president Barack Obama has said that if Syria’s government were to use chemical weapons, the US would be forced to act. German politicians have said that they will give no leeway to Greece regarding financial reform. Israel has positioned an Iron Dome, a rocket interceptor and destroyer, on the Egyptian border following two rocket attacks on the city of Eilat. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism says that the US government must allow investigation into...

...the weapons the neocons have in their arsenal these days. The first, as Heilbrunn notes, is Barack Obama, or more precisely discontent with his apparently reactive and hesitating approach to foreign and security policy, exemplified by situations such as Ukraine, Syria and the rise of ISIS. If you read the fine print, to the extent there is any, the neocons like Cheney and Bill Kristol don’t have any master plan or worked out strategy of their own for dealing with these problems. They appeal to the heartwarming (for some Americans)...