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09 Sep

[Ralph Mamiya is team leader for the Protection of Civilians Team in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations but writes here in a purely personal capacity, and the views expressed do not represent official positions of his Department or the United Nations. This post is the concluding post of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] This week’s symposium on the protection of civilians highlighted...

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08 Sep

[Kjetil Mujezinović Larsen is Professor of Law, Director of Research, and Deputy Director, at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the University of Oslo. He is the author of «The Human Rights Treaty Obligations of Peacekeepers» (Cambridge, 2012). This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] By way of introduction, let me state that I agree with Marten’s...

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08 Sep

[Marten Zwanenburg is legal counsel at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] In this post, I will focus on Mona’s chapter in “Protection of Civilians”, in...

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07 Sep

[Marten Zwanenburg is legal counsel at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] Let me start by saying that the publication of “Protection of Civilians” is very...

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07 Sep

[Ray Murphy is a Professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, National University of Ireland Galway. This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] Although there have been many pronouncements and reports on the need to protect civilians, it is debatable if this has translated into increased security on the ground. The emphasis seems...

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06 Sep

[Siobhán Wills is a Professor of Law at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] In 2014 the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services published an ‘evaluation of the implementation and results of Protection of Civilians mandates in United Nations peacekeeping operations’ which: noted a persistent pattern of peacekeeping operations...

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05 Sep

PassBlue published a very disturbing article yesterday about nominations for five vacant UN Special Rapporteur positions. According to the article, although the President of the Human Rights Council, South Korea's Choi Kyonglim, has endorsed four of the selection committee's five first choices, he has refused to endorse its first choice for Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Karim...

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05 Sep

[Ralph Mamiya is team leader for the Protection of Civilians Team in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations but writes here in a purely personal capacity, and the views expressed do not represent official positions of his Department or the United Nations.] The protection of civilians is both a well-established topic in international law and also a relatively new and controversial...

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05 Sep

[Grazyna Baranowska is a Senior Researcher at the Poznań Human Rights Centre of the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.] The nature of enforced disappearances is that it affects whole families, rather than only the individuals who disappeared. While the majority of the forcibly disappeared are men, these disappearances have a strong economic, socials and psychological effects on the...

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29 Aug

[Amina Adanan is a PhD candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, NUI Galway.]  In common law and civil law legal systems it is the responsibility of the public prosecutor to determine whether the prosecution of an international crime is pursued. The level of this discretionary power and the considerations to be taken into account in making the...

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23 Aug

Defense One points to a news story in the Baghdad Post that the Iraqi Security Forces may be preparing to deploy a ground-combat robot: Loosely dubbed Alrobot — Arabic for robot — it has four cameras, an automatic machine gun, and a launcher for Russian-made Katyusha rockets, and can be operated by laptop and radio link from a kilometer away, the...

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