Search: self-defense
10 Sep Samuel Moyn on the History of Human Rights and the Human Rights Movement
...a global perspective, the brief career of human rights in the 1940s is the story of how the Allied nations elevated language about human rights as they reneged on the earlier wartime promise—made in the 1941 Atlantic Charter—of the self-determination of peoples. Global self-determination would have spelled the end of empire, but by war’s end the Allies had come around to Winston Churchill’s clarification that this promise applied only to Hitler’s empire, not empire in general (and certainly not Churchill’s). The Atlantic Charter set the world on fire, but because...
02 Oct The “Frozen” Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh
...that the right to self-determination leads to secession outside of the colonial paradigm, or outside cases of extreme oppression. Instead, most authorities on self-determination would agree that the right needs to be exercised internally, through an autonomy regime within the confines of the existing parent state. Thus, the international community’s stance that Nagorno-Karabakh ought to remain a part of Azerbaijan, with some type of autonomous status, appears consistent with international law and most other precedents (except for Kosovo). Although the international community’s attitude vis-à-vis Nagorno-Karabakh appears rooted in international law,...23 Jul Self-Aggrandizement Alert: Two New Publications
I’m delighted to announce the publication of two new essays. The first is “The Use and Abuse of Analogy in IHL,” which is a chapter in Jens’s edited book for CUP, “Theoretical Boundaries of Armed Conflict and Human Rights.” I’m very proud of the essay — and all of the contributions to the book are excellent. The second publication is my article “Radical Complementarity,” which has just appeared in the Journal of International Criminal Justice. Here is the abstract: In March 2015, a domestic court in Côte d’Ivoire...06 Sep Towards Neutralizing the Jihadi Narrative: Settlement (No Pun Intended) of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
...as a shapeless abstraction which claimants of all kinds can shape Humpty-Dumpty-like to the needs of their particular causes). Palestine is the last of the Non-Self-Governing territories recognized as such at the inception of the UN. The others have experienced some process of self-determination, even if nothing more than “one person, one vote, once.” In the case of Palestine, the appropriate organ of the UN, the General Assembly, concluded (in 1947) that there were two People ( a politically sensible simplification, of course) in the territory and that in the...
15 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: Conflicts of Interest in International Law Scholarship – Addressing An Indifference to Capitalist Imperialism
[Isa Blumi is Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University.] Dr. Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force (2021) charts how International Law’s founding generations of scholars sought relevance during times when the powerful adopted “the law” only when it suited their interests. By reading beyond the ‘emotional’, ‘cynical’, or ‘idealistic’ discourse that accompanied assertive claims about the distinctive eras of this Euro-American global order, Verdebout (pp. 213-319) methodically ‘deconstructs’ the self-serving discourse of 20th century scholars’ assumptions that they have improved...
03 Aug Options for a Peace Settlement for Ukraine: Option Paper XIII – Inclusion and Transparency in the Ukrainian Peace Process
...self-determination, the right to vote and take part in public affairs, and the prohibition of discrimination. As a fundamental rule of international law proclaimed in the UN Charter, human rights agreements and international customary law, self-determination gives peoples the right to ‘freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (Art. 1). The internal aspect of self-determination ‘implies meaningful participation in the process of government’ (p 30). Some scholars have relied on self-determination to argue that in the post-conflict situation there is a need to...
13 Aug Why the Executive Order on the ICC is Unconstitutional and Self-Defeating
...Foreign States Second, the Rome Statute is an international treaty that supplements, but does not supplant each State Party’s right to exercise jurisdiction over criminal suspects who are either their nationals or who commit crimes in their territory. As such, every State Party can choose to exercise that jurisdiction itself or to delegate that jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court. This EO, if implemented, would directly interfere in all 123 State Parties’ own sovereignty by penalizing their right to make that choice. Hypocritically, the US itself is not a State...