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Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

23 Jul

A top UN envoy, Leila Zerrougui, special representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, has warned officials and anti-government fighters in Syria risk prosecution as war criminals for atrocities against children. The US House Intelligence Committee says it is now willing to supply weapons to Syrian rebels despite the risk of their ending up with al-Qaeda allies. Additionally, top US military officials have outlined a range of intervention option plans in Syria, from instituting no-fly zones to conducting limited attacks on military targets. Iran condemned the EU’s decision...
23.07.13 | |

27 Aug

...enormous controversy, with the 2011 military intervention in Libya and the failure to act with regard to Syria, causing bitter divisions between the Council’s five powerful permanent members. The international community also completely failed to halt atrocities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Yemen. While this is not an exhaustive list, it points to the enormity of the political challenge that currently faces us. So far, the twenty-first century has been plagued by toxic nationalism and resurgent xenophobia. The number of people displaced by persecution, conflict and atrocities is at its...
27.08.20 | |

15 Aug

...Tamil sources provided updates that fell on deaf ears. For instance, it took years for international stakeholders to admit that the military killed tens of thousands of Tamil civilians, which Tamils on the ground had reported in real-time. While Tamils were identifying the GoSL’s atrocities as genocide against their people, international human rights organizations kept quiet, or actively rejected, even the risk of genocide (see, e.g., 42:19–45:00) despite UN guidance encouraging different actors to acknowledge when violations of international law may amount to genocide. Evidence of the GoSL’s Genocide Against...
15.08.19 | |

24 Feb

...US and EU for a comprehensive trade and investment pact are set to kick into higher gear, following a highly-anticipated “political stocktaking” meeting between the two sides’ top trade officials. US prosecutors plan to seek the extradition of Mexico’s most wanted man, drug cartel kingpin Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, to face trial in the United States after he was captured in Mexico. Middle East The UN Security Council achieved rare unity to act on Syria’s civil war when Russia and China supported adoption of a resolution to boost aid access in...
24.02.14 | |

12 Dec

middle: Algeria (84), Argentina (93), Brazil (70), Paraguay (111), Peru (70), Iran (105), Libya (105), Syria (93). According to the press release by TI’s chair, Huguette Labelle, corruption is “rampant” in half of the countries of the world. He further argues that there is a strong correlation between corruption and poverty. “Corruption eats away at the economies of poor countries. The perception of endemic corruption scares off foreign investors and has a knock-on effect on economic growth. A corrupt government siphoning off a country’s great mineral wealth, for instance, is...
12.12.06 | |

03 Nov

...prepare any development thereof”. It is also a prominent feature of humanitarian discussions that, in different fora, NGOs advocate for new rules or the modification of existing ones. In describing this phenomenon, however, it is also necessary to consider the role of NSAGs in shaping, interpreting, and making the law, for instance through the conclusion of special agreements between the parties to the conflict or via the adoption of action plans with the UN. In 2019, two NSAGs from the Central African Republic, and one from Syria, signed the latter,...
03.11.20 | |

01 Apr

...the COVID-19 virus. In Syria, where there is credible evidence to demonstrate that Syrian and Russian forces have targeted hospitals and ad hoc medical facilities, the risk of large numbers of infected persons receiving no treatment is clear, particularly where there are tens of thousands in detention facilities. Yemen has been forced to contend with a devastating attack by the military might of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and has been ravaged by disease and starvation. An outbreak of COVID-19 would devastate an already fragile state. Bangladesh –...
01.04.20 | |

03 Apr

...skillfully argued that members of English, American and French governments could be held liable as accomplices on these interpretations of complicity for arming Libyan rebels, and that Russian officials might face a similar fate in Syria. I am far from certain that these cases would satisfy the more traditional concept of complicity I set out here, but if they do, I see no rationale for circumscribing the scope of defensible criminal doctrine. By the same token, should the ICTY suddenly redefine torture to accommodate practices that are now ubiquitous in...
03.04.13 | |

08 Oct

Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired rockets into Israel in retaliation for yesterday’s Israeli strikes in the Gaza strip. Amnesty International has reported that Rwandan military intelligence services have engaged in torture, unlawful detention and enforced disappearances of civilians . Sudanese state media reports that the border between Sudan and South Sudan will reopen today, after a security agreement was reached last month. Turkish forces fired across the border into Syria on Sunday after a shell launched from Syria landed in Turkey’s border town of Akcakale, underlining Ankara’s warning...
08.10.12 | |

08 Nov

...giving UN humanitarian agencies and their partners authority to breach Syria’s sovereignty by using border crossings to access that state. The rationale was to permit this violation of sovereignty ‘in order to ensure that humanitarian assistance, including medical and surgical supplies, reaches people in need throughout Syria’. The Security Council, in a distinct yet not unrelated situation of war and crisis then, might have acted under a different power and source of legitimacy than the Flotilla, but it should not be considered as less political, or as being more humanitarian....
08.11.14 | |

07 Oct

Looking back at all the debates over whether the United States could have legal authority to use force in Syria, I was struck by the presence of two very different types of arguments about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). For some, the R2P questions were interpretative in nature — what did R2P mean (i.e., does it require Security Council authorization) and how does its meaning apply in the Syrian context? Obviously, different interpretative methods and techniques could generate different answers to what R2P meant, and, with them, different outcomes for...
07.10.13 | |

10 Aug

The UK has appointed a senior judge to lead the inquest in the death of Russian ex-spy Litvinenko from polonium poising in 2006 in London. Veteran international diplomat, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been tapped as Kofi Annan’s successor as UN-Arab League joint special envoy for Syria. In the Syrian conflict, government troops have forced rebels from a key district in the city of Aleppo. In response to the PILPG memo featured in our Weekday News Wrap on Wednesday, the New International Law Blog offers an analysis posing the question: Would intervention...
10.08.12 | |