I have uploaded a revised version of my article "The Concept of 'The Human' in the Critique of Autonomous Weapons" to SSRN. It is not substantially different than the previous version, but I've made a number of changes in response to excellent feedback from Robert Sparrow, Nathan Gabriel Wood, my colleague Neil Renic, and my sometimes co-author Lena Trabucco. My...
[Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations for more than 15 years. She is currently a Senior Fellow in International Law at the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia, an independent think tank based in Yerevan.] Sheila Paylan has previously served as a pro bono advisor to the Republic of Armenia in the aftermath...
[Relja Radović is an attorney at law based and qualified in Belgrade, Serbia, with an academic background in international adjudication and investment treaty arbitration.] Another episode in the saga on Kosovo’s status in the international community took place on 27 February 2023, when the EU announced that the President of Serbia and the Prime Minister of Kosovo have agreed on the...
Calls for Papers ‘Professionals and Professionalism(s) in International Criminal Justice’: On Friday 14 July 2023 the School of Law and the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Leeds is hosting an International Workshop ‘Professionals and Professionalism(s) in International Criminal Justice’. The workshop will be looking at three main themes: (1) The International Criminal Justice professional (How do diverse practitioners view their role?...
[Judge Zak (Zakeria M.) Yacoob is a Retired Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.] The Court of the Citizens of the World – a peoples tribunal – was organized by the Cinema for Peace Foundation, relating to the crime of aggression in Ukraine. The tribunal considered charges brought against Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression presented by...
[Vito Todeschini is a legal expert focusing on human rights and accountability in the context of Palestine/Israel and the wider MENA region.] Introduction In September 2022, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (COI), and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967...
Where is knowledge headed? AI gate-crashed our thinking, leaving this question on everyone's mind. The answer is probably not surprising: wherever the thinker wants it to go, more Rorschach test than prediction, as assumptions about desirable scientific trajectories dictate our response. I have been thinking about knowledge a lot these days. Along with the rise of AI, two of my PhDs...
Events Frontier Clash: New Developments in the Application of International Human Rights Law to Armed Conflicts: On 13 March at 5:30pm GMT, the International Law at Westminster (ILaW) research cluster will host a panel on Frontier Clash: New Developments in the Application of International Human Rights Law to Armed Conflicts, with Prof. Yuval Shany (Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former member of...
[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. He has recently published The Democratisation of the European Union.] Seventy years after the start of the experiment with pooling sovereignty, the European Union turns out to embody the most significant innovation of the modern state system so far. The hallmark of the EU in its present form is that it...
[Michael McLaughlin is a cybersecurity attorney and policy advisor in the Washington, D.C. office of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, P.C. He is the former senior counterintelligence advisor for United States Cyber Command and a research affiliate for the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the United States Naval Academy and...
[Nandini Gupta is a final-year law student.] “The Earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know. We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is...
Brazil is back. After four years of retrenchment, the new Lula government seems ready to assume, once again, a key position in the international stage. This is a role that Lula knows how to play well. His previous government created the now defunct Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), meant as a counter-weight to a US-dominated OAS. By the time he left office, the region...