Search: crossing lines
20 Aug Symposium on Informers Up Close: Weaponizing the Populace
...mistreated by their superiors, they are simply enduring what they signed up for. So, too, with soldiers in the American all-volunteer military, or the former prisoners who have secured a way out of prison by agreeing to deploy to the front lines in Russia’s war against Ukraine without proper training or equipment. The fact that someone has chosen a life, however, does not vitiate the state’s responsibilities to treat that person as an individual with dignity. What that means, of course, will vary according to the particular context. But the...
23 Oct Compliance Symposium: The Role of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict
...Armed Conflict was created by the General Assembly ( Resolution A/RES/51/77 ) following the publication, in 1996, of a report by Graça Machel titled the “Impact of Armed Conflict on Children”. The Machel Report provided the first comprehensive assessment of the multiple ways in which children are abused and brutalized in the context of war. It highlighted that contemporary warfare was changing and that the lines between civilian and combatant were no longer clear, with children often on the frontline and directly targeted. It stressed the disproportionate impact of war on children and...16 Oct Obama Will “Engage” on Sudan (And Ignore the ICC)
...Scott Gration, said that the policy, to be announced Monday by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, would make use of a mix of “incentives and pressure” to put an end to the human rights abuses that have left millions of people dead and displaced while burningDarfur into the American conscience. General Gration said the administration would set strict time lines for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan to fulfill the conditions of a 2005 peace agreementthat his government signed with rebels in southern Sudan; under the agreement, a proposal for...
23 Feb Aerial Incident of 25 December 2024: Issues of Russian Responsibility
[Doniyor Mutalov is a Research Assistant at the Center for International Law and Governance, where he works with Professor Sebastián Mantilla Blanco. He holds an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University and was awarded the Leo Gross Prize for excellence in law studies] Facts On December 25, 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190 with 67 people aboard, was shot down by the Russian Armed Forces while flying over the Chechnya region of Russia. The plane then crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38...05 Aug Don’t Blame Us, the United Nations Made Us Do It
...Act. But if the Coast Guard delegates its responsibility for traffic separation schemes to the International Maritime Organization, and if we accept this delegation as relieving the Coast Guard of any responsibility for them, no such recourse is available. The International Maritime Organization is not subject to the Administrative Procedure Act or the ESA…. “[W]hen an agency delegates power to outside parties, lines of accountability may blur, undermining an important democratic check on government decision-making.” Appellees point to no evidence showing that Congress intended to undermine the ability of injured...
06 Feb The ‘Negotiating Text’ of the new WHO Treaty on Pandemic Preparedness and Response: An Initial Analysis and Underexamined Points of Concern
...Influenza and in domestic public health guidelines (p.70) on the response to infectious disease outbreaks. The draft provisions of the Negotiating Treaty examined in the following reflect the main components of the biomedical approach and its envisaged domestic and international institutions. The Envisaged Global Bio-surveillance System The Negotiating Text foresees the building of a global bio-surveillance system with international (WHO) and domestic components. In short, the draft treaty envisages that each state builds up laboratory capacities that then work together as a global network through which they can identify emerging...25 Mar Posner and Sykes Book Symposium: Comment by Emilie Hafner-Burton and David Victor
...the law and economics movement, Posner and Sykes evaluate law mainly as an instrument of economic policy. For them, the central questions turn on economic efficiency and on whether states see practical, sustained benefits from participation in international legal arrangements. This approach helps explain why this work will be easy for scholars from political economy and the so-called “rationalist” schools of political science to understand and accept. The economic approach that Posner and Sykes elegantly describe also puts intellectual battle lines into sharp relief. For scholars in law schools and...
08 Aug Symposium on Unbroken Bond: Tracing the Ties Between African and Palestinian Anti-Colonial Struggles – The Application of International Law to Legitimise Settler Colonialism and Land Grabbing in Zimbabwe and Palestine: An Analysis of the Van Pezold and Ben Sourik Decisions
...legacy of this problematic philosophy is echoed in the contemporary land grabbing practices in Palestine and, indeed, within international law frameworks as well. Hidden between the lines in the Van Pezold and Beit Sourik decisions is an implicit assumption that international law and its application will continue serving post-colonial imperial capitalist interests simply because it (international law) is drafted in a manner which does not account for colonial history. International law is prospective in nature and the world must not repeat the injustices of colonialism, yet, what about colonialism’s afterlives? ...
18 Aug States of Justice Symposium: Politicised Referrals are Still Referrals Nonetheless
...that will mitigate the use of international criminal justice for political and security ends; and not blur the lines between peace and justice (Werle and Zimmermann 2019, 3). The idea that international justice is “inherently political” (Ba 2020, 65) holds true for the instances highlighted by Ba in the book. Similarly, bringing perpetrators of gross human rights violations to account; providing victims of international crimes with a platform to detail their violation; and providing reparations for victims is also justice. In conclusion, Russian novelist and philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes: “When...22 Jul Does the U.S. Need a Declaration of War on Al-Qaida?
...world we live in, not the world we wish we lived in. Such rules should not provide greater protection than we would provide to American citizens held as enemy combatants in this conflict; and they must assure that court proceedings are not permitted to interfere with the mission of our armed forces. In other words, soldiers fighting the war on terror, for example, should not be required to leave the front lines to testify as witnesses in habeas hearings. Affidavits prepared after battlefield activities have ceased should be enough. And,...