Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

South Korea has agreed to negotiate with North Korea on the reopening of a joint industrial park that was closed in April after rising tensions. The ICC Prosecutor has reported to the UN Security Council on the situation in Darfur. The EU Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator wants member states to do more to restrict their citizens travelling to Syria to fight with extremist groups. Syrian rebels have seized the only border crossing between Syria and Israel on the Golan Heights. The IMF has issued a report admitting that it made mistakes in...

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Suspected Boko Haram militants ambushed a convoy carrying Nigeria’s chief of army staff on a tour of towns in troubled Borno state, the army said early on Sunday. Middle East and Northern Africa The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has blown up a 2,000-year-old temple in the UNESCO-listed Syrian city of Palmyra, a rights group and the country’s antiquities chief have said. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has said that its...

Turkey has struck back at Syria, after a mortar attack killed five Turkish civilians in a city close to the Syrian border. In an urgent meeting, NATO has urged Syria to respect international law. Turkey has also requested a response by the UN Security Council, but Russia asked for a day delay. Four UN Peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in West Darfur. At their next meeting in mid-October, Europe’s Foreign Affairs Ministers will reportedly consider tighter sanctions on Iran, including stricter limits on Iranian Central Bank assets in European...

...strikes on numerous cities in Azerbaijan, including those with no military targets. For instance, an attack on a cemetery in the city of Tartar killed four civilians and injured four others attending a funeral. Solely residential dwellings in Ganja – an Azerbaijani city 97 kilometres from the conflict zone – were repeatedly targeted in overnight attacks, thereby increasing the number of civilian deaths. A recent Amnesty International report similarly confirmed that strikes carried out by Armenian forces killed and harmed civilians “not directly participating in hostilities and not in the...

...individuals (ibid). As he ably explains, in relation to sanctions in States such as Syria and Venezuela, it is difficult to extricate the homemade misery from that caused by extraterritorial sanctions: while, on the one hand, sanctions clearly contribute to the aggravation of an already precarious human rights situation, he says, “one cannot claim that sanctions have caused the current humanitarian crisis in Syria or that they are responsible for the collapse of the Venezuelan economy”(ibid 399). Against that background, it may, as he comes close to implying, well be...

...of international law. Rather than follow the political question – that of whether Palestine is an actual state on a par with states such as Switzerland or Syria – Al-Haq has rooted its consideration of the matter strictly in international law. Al-Haq’s paper considers whether the PA exercises jurisdiction over the crimes set forth in the Rome Statute of the ICC, and whether the meaning of ‘state’ for the purposes of the Rome Statute can properly be interpreted to include an entity such as Palestine. Davenport’s paper stresses that the...

...a cease-fire in Syria during the Muslim holiday of Id al-Adha, as proposed by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN-Arab League Special Envoy for Syria. The International Criminal Court has pleaded with the UN Security Council for more support to ensure states cooperated with inquiries of the Court, citing problems in Darfur and Libya. GIsha, the Israeli NGO advocating for the freedom of movement of Palestinians, has claimed that reports released by the Israeli Defence Ministry under a freedom of information request show that Israel limited food supplies in the Gaza strip...

By now, many readers -especially those who follow me on Twitter, will have figured out that I have a weird hobby: I like keeping track of who says what about international law in times of crisis. I’ve done it for the Syria strikes of 2018, the Venezuelan elections of 2018, the recognition of Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela in 2019, the attack on Qasem Soleimani in 2020, and now, of course, the crisis in Ukraine. In the beginning, I tracked the reactions to Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk...

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Zambia’s government is trying to send hundreds of refugees back to camps after two people were burned to death in anti-immigration riots in the country’s capital, Lusaka. Heavy fighting between a local militia and Ethiopian paramilitary militia known as the Liyu Police broke out in Galgadud region of central Somalia, residents said on Saturday. Middle East and Northern Africa The UN special envoy for Syria has estimated that 400,000 people have been killed throughout...

to protect Turkey against a Syrian attack. Additionally, NATO has warned Syria against using chemical weapons, with an immediate international response as the consequence. The Guardian is reporting that the former spokesman of the Syrian foreign affairs ministry has defected and is on his way to the US. Mali’s government has agreed to holding peace talks with two separatist rebel groups. The European Union is mulling a collective response to Israel’s planned expansion of settlements into the West Bank, while Germany’s Angela Merkel is nonplussed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin...

...at the University of Oxford, in partnership with the International Bar Association and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Simon Skjodt Center for Genocide Prevention, that seeks to understand how UN mandate holders with a focus on accountability can be better supported. These include Fact-Finding Missions (FFMs), Commissions of Inquiry (CoIs), and the generation of UN accountability mechanisms – the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria (IIIM), the International Independent Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), and the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) – referred...

...international organisation (he currently heads two investigative teams, in Myanmar and Syria, for the Commission for International Justice and Accountability). Lenayapa’s comments suggest that Kenya thinks neither African candidate is viable, given that Fatou Bensouda is from an African country. And he clearly believes that Roy’s election is precluded by the Rome Statute. (I think that’s wrong — as I’ve suggested on Twitter, the ASP could elect Roy if the current Deputy Prosecutor, James Stewart, was willing to resign.) Let me start by saying that I think any of the...