Events and Announcements: May 1, 2106

Event

• The University of Sheffield School of Law Annual James Muiruri International Law Lecture will be held on Wednesday 11 May at 6pm. Prof Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, University of Oxford, will speak on Refugees in our Time: The Challenges of Protection and Security.  The lecture will take place in The Diamond lecture theatre. For more details and to register click here. Over the past two years or so, Europe has been challenged, like many countries in the ‘south’, by what to do when faced with large numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, many in desperate need of protection and assistance. True to form, some alarmists have raised the security spectre, as if enough ‘terrorists’ were not home-grown, or able anyway to use regular means of transport, and forgetful of the extent to which States have already ‘securitised’ the movement of people, certainly since the mid-1990s, if not much earlier. Europe’s failure, however, has not been on the security front; rather, it has so far failed to live up to its principles, to make the best use of existing mechanisms, institutions and laws, and to think pro-actively, outside the box, so as to develop a regime of protection, asylum and migration management fit for the twenty-first century, in which both the rights of individuals and communities and the interests of States can be effectively, lawfully and equitably accommodated. This lecture will look over at the past, and make some suggestions for a future.

Announcements

• The Codification Division of the UN Office of Legal Affairs recently added new lectures to the UN Audiovisual Library of International Law website, which provides high quality international law training and research materials to users around the world free of charge. The latest lectures were given by Professor Alex Oude Elferink on “International Law and Negotiated and Adjudicated Maritime Boundaries: A Complex Relationship” and Sir Nigel Rodley on “United Nations Treaty and Charter-based Human Rights Bodies: Competitive or Complimentary?”.
• A new open access law journal: European papers. A Journal on Law and Integration has launched. European papers is conceived of as a cultural project: a tool for reflecting on European integration, in its multiple dimensions, as a breeding place for ideas. To achieve this goal, we have thought of European papers as a living laboratory with a dual nature: a four-monthly electronic scientific e-Journal and a ‘militant’ European Forum designed as a hotbed for intellectual discussion and keeping in touch with the latest developments. The first issue of the e-Journal is here, including, amongst others, contributions by Christian Joerges, Jan Klabbers, Carol Harlow, Christophe Hillion, Dimitry Kochenov and Martijn van den Brink, Bruno Nascimbene. The European Forum’s Highlights and Insights on EU law and European integration are arranged ratione materiae and can be downloaded here.

Our previous events and announcements post can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us with a one-paragraph description of your announcement along with hyperlinks to more information.