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...

...in the African state. Meanwhile, the EU has pledged to organize an international donor conference in mid-May to help with Mali’s reconstruction. The EU has eased sanctions on Zimbabwe and pledged to lift sanctions on a state-owned diamond company once fair elections have been held. North Korea on the other hand has to face increased sanctions from the EU, going beyond those already imposed by the UN Security Council. The EU has decided not to lift the arms embargo on Syria, but will increase direct support to the rebels. Meanwhile,...

According to a recent report, tens of millions of dollars from the CIA were delivered to the office of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai over the course of decades, meant to buy US influence in Afghanistan. Syria’s neighbors are wary of a US-led intervention, should the US decide to take military action in the face of new evidence of chemical weapon use by the Syrian government–evidence that Syria claims is “inconsistent with reality and a barefaced lie.” Iraq’s media regulator has suspended licenses of ten broadcasters, including Al-Jazeera, accusing them of...

...well as national courts, including others that operate under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Such qualitative outcomes are the harvest of seeds which have been planted across the international criminal justice ecosystem and include: the dedication of curious and skilful prosecutors that do not shy away from looking across jurisdiction or collaborating with investigative mechanisms, such as IIIM-Syria and UNITAD (p.35-36). The consideration of the work of the Syria COI, Yazda and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and other European criminal justice authorities successfully facilitated through Eurojust contributed...

...of prosecution for fleeing having to indirectly support the crimes have a claim to persecution, or does it only attach to people fleeing having to directly perpetrate the crimes? What about conscientious objectors? For answers, we turn to the cases of an American fleeing participation in the 2003 US-Iraq War and a Syrian fleeing conscription into the Syrian army in the 2011 Syrian civil war. While it Is n’t EZ, P recedent Ca n be O ur Shepherd In April 2007, an enlisted American helicopter maintenance mechanic named André Shepherd...

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...

As NATO meets over the downing of Turkey’s jet by Syria, Turkey has also written to the UN Security Council that the attack is a “serious threat to peace and security”. The EU foreign ministers have urged Turkey to exercise restraint in its responses. Meanwhile, Syria has allegedly shot at a second Turkish jet. In an interview, the Director-General of MI5 has revealed that the UK has faced 11 credible terrorist threats since 2001, and that the terror threat has been widening since the Arab Spring. Rwanda’s foreign minister has...