Search: crossing lines
15 Mar Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian Border Crisis and Ius ad Bellum Part II
...the plane to Belarus with the intention of reaching the EU, it is not simple to say if they ultimately agreed that: 1) the crossing was going to be illegal and 2) the crossing might be forced. This is even more difficult to accept when one assesses that the migrants might be victims of state-sponsored criminal acts like smuggling and human trafficking. Migrants who want to leave the frontier have been subjected to abuse. On a factual basis, it cannot be denied that among migrants there might be undercover agents...
03 Oct The Agreement Between the UK and France on the Prevention of Dangerous Journeys
...illegal crossing before – subject to full documentation and security and eligibility checks.’ As the Agreement entered into force, Channel crossings in small boats by persons seeking to claim international protection in the United Kingdom were continuing at a high level- official figures released on 11 August 2025 confirmed that more than 50,000 people had made the journey since July 2024, up from some 36,000 in the preceding twelve months. It continues to be dangerous and in some cases lethal-at least 20 people are recorded as having died in connection...
01 Nov Conversation on WAR
...peace-keeping commander saying there was too much confusion about what it meant to move from peace-keeping to war fighting. He calls it ‘crossing the Mogadishu line’ and claimed that crossing that line was to the detriment of the peacekeepers and the people of Somalia. So talking about war or war fighting can be a signifier: moving from engaging in the use of force for a certain limited end i.e. to deliver food in Somalia or protect civilians, to something where your limited mission is seemingly put aside and you put...23 Sep Book Symposium: Cyber War – A Duty to Hack and the Boundaries of Analogical Reasoning
...(including the potential for it to incentivize greater military cyber surveillance to solidify the reliability of various cyber capabilities). In doing this analysis, however, I was struck by the larger challenges of using analogies to carve out the existing lines of IHL in cyberspace (not to mention the contours of any new lines that I propose). As a result, I ended up framing my chapter around a larger, introductory analysis of the role of boundaries in legal discourse over cyberspace. Readers may be familiar with debates over whether cyberspace is...12 May Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 1)
...IHL. International Humanitarian Law The letter frames its claims on the following argument: “International humanitarian law is unequivocal that where a civilian population is in need of life-saving aid, impartial humanitarian action ‘shall be undertaken’. In order to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, international law requires impartial humanitarian actors to seek the consent of the parties concerned. In February 2014, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2139 demanding that all parties, in particular the Syrian authorities, allow rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access across conflict lines...
03 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Reflections on the “Scorecard,” Transnational Legal Process and the Paris Agreement
...give one example, the normative idea of transnational legal process would suggest that the travel ban should have been litigated as an international human rights issue. In practice, however, the litigation had to be rooted in the Establishment Clause and administrative law arguments to prevail in the lower courts (and even these arguments, dismayingly, did not win a majority of the Supreme Court). Professor Koh gives a good description of this litigation, but he does not address the tension between his transnational legal process frame and the lines on which...
14 Dec The Unconscious Lightness of Play: On Research and International Law
[David Matyas is a PhD Candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law whose research focuses on the laws of humanitarian assistance. Before turning to law, he worked as an aid worker focusing on disaster risk, with placements in Niger and Senegal.] Each year, as the holidays roll around in winter and summer, I’m reminded of a few lines by US Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis to a young lawyer at his firm. He writes, “The bow must be strung and...
06 Mar Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: The Epistemic Turn in Doctoral Education
...public quality to practical knowledge as we use it to progress defined social purposes: information transmission, problem-solving, career progression, innovation, and future-building figure high in our priorities. It also possesses a private character as we employ it to improve professional practice and industrial activities in service of individual and corporate interests. Despite the purported division between universities and the real world, researchers produce knowledge destined for assembly lines and boardrooms as well. Most influential of all the forms is knowledge as identity. The knowledge we internalise is intimate, comparable to...
15 Feb Spirituality and Duress: Local Culture Beliefs at the International Criminal Court
...rendition of figure 3. It illustrates the extent to which meaning produced in testimony can be altered through ignoring its wider interactional context: Once the Judge obtains the answer that later reappears as part of ‘the pattern’ (lines 12-14), he returns the floor to the defence counsel. The latter in turn invites the witness to recontextualize his previous answers, by asking two targeted questions about the time frame of his belief (lines 17-18 and 20-21). In the answer (only partially reproduced here), the witness responds with a biographical account that...
14 Dec Drug Boats, Drone Strikes and the Dangers of Avoiding Mirrors
...rules-based, accountable warfare. It is an early example of the very erosion of norms that many civil society groups, legal scholars, and human rights experts warned would follow from an overly elastic interpretation of both domestic and international law. The lesson here is not that the Obama and Trump administrations are identical. Let me be clear: they are not. But it is essential to acknowledge that once legal lines are blurred, future administrations, especially those less committed to being governed by the rule of law, will simply drive straight through...