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Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

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 | |

21 Mar

Mauritania has agreed to extradite ex-Libyan chief-of-intelligence Abdullah al-Senussi to Libya. The Economist outlines the world’s biggest arms exporters based on a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. US President Barack Obama is slated to visit the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea today ahead of his upcoming visit with South Korean president, Lee Meyung-Bak. Western powers diluted the language of a U.N. Security Council resolution regarding Syria in order to garner Russian support; in response, speaking from Jakarta, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon once again...
21.03.12 | |

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 | |

11 Apr

...Syria. Foreign Policy outlines the options for Syria, in case the plan does not succeed. According to its Foreign Minister, William Hague, the UK may seek a Security Council decision referring Assad to the ICC. In a Reuter’s exclusive, China’s ZTE trading firm had planned on selling $10.5 million (€8 millon) worth of embargoed computing equipment to Iran, shedding some light on how Iran is able to get American tech products despite sanctions. The Philippine Navy is in a standoff with Chinese ships. Colombia’s foreign minister reports that Venezuelan President...
11.04.12 | |

05 Feb

For those who try to keep up with the shifting nature of radical Islamist groups – groups too many in the media sometimes wrongly link to Al Qaeda –the stories earlier this week on the group formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, now calling itself ISIS, are significant: Early Monday morning the leadership of al-Qaeda disowned Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the most effective of its two franchises fighting in Syria, in a maneuver that could alter the trajectory of the fight against President Bashar Assad....
05.02.14 | |

09 Sep

...given that there was a Review Conference less than two years ago. Adopting the amendment would require 2/3 of States Parties to vote in favour of it, pursuant to Art. 121(3). I will be surprised if the amendment is not taken up and adopted. Even acknowledging that states do not like to tie their hands against internal threats, there is no justification for starving civilians as part of a counterinsurgency. And, of course, NIACs regularly feature the intentional starvation of civilians — most obviously in Syria and Yemen. To be...
09.09.19 | |

04 Sep

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the US has agreed upon a draft AUMF, authorizing President Obama to carry out strikes in Syria. Foreign Policy has a post warning that this 60-day authorization may be just a prelude to intervention in the Middle East as well as a piece entitled The Syrian Abyss. Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country may approve a military operation in Syria if evidence shows that Damascus carried out chemical weapons attacks, but only if the operation is conducted with U.N. approval. Kenya’s parliament debated...
04.09.13 | |

03 May

the siege. I was joined by Hussam Alkatlaby, the Executive Director of the Syrian Violations Documentation Centre; Joost Hiltermann, programme director for Middle East & North Africa at the International Crisis Group; and Robin Peeters, the Syria Policy Officer in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You can watch a recording of the event on the University of Amsterdam website here. The panel was sponsored by the War Reparations Centre at the Amsterdam Centre for International Law (ACIL); the Amsterdam Students Association of International Law; and the Syria Legal Network....
03.05.18 | |

19 Apr

[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor, at The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS, and Chair of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Criminal Court Committee. The views expressed are those of the author.] Postings on Opinio Juris seem fairly squarely against the legality of the U.S. missile strike last week into Syria. Let me join Jens David Ohlin (blogging on Opinio Juris) and Harold Koh (blogging on Just Security) in making the contrary case. When NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999, member states did not have UN...
19.04.17 | |

09 Feb

...renditions.” As Human Rights Watch notes: The CIA has regularly transferred detainees to countries in the Middle East , including Egypt and Syria , known to practice torture routinely. There are reportedly 100 to 150 cases of such “extraordinary renditions.” In one case, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian in transit in New York , was detained by U.S. authorities and sent to Syria . He was released without charge from Syrian custody ten months later and has described repeated torture, often with cables and electrical cords. In another case, a...
09.02.06 | |

10 May

[Dr. Mohamed Helal is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law & Affiliated Faculty at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University.] I would like to start off by thanking Opinio Juris for hosting what has evolved into something of a mini-symposium on the legality of the veto, the powers and purposes of the Security Council, and, implicitly, the values and principles underlying international law. I would also like to thank Professor Jennifer Trahan for engaging with and responding to my rejoinder...
10.05.18 | |

19 Sep

...the meantime. Examples include the International Independent and Impartial Mechanism (IIIM) for Syria, and the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. At the current session of the Human Rights Council, the Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar has called for establishment of an IIIM pending referral to the ICC or an ad hoc tribunal. Opening Remarks were given by Ambassador Monique T.G. van Daalen, Permanent Mission of the Netherlands. The Moderator was Saman Zia-Zarifi, Secretary General, International Commission of Jurists. The panelists included Catherine Marchi-Uhel, Head, International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism...
19.09.18 | |