Law Commons^™

Reputation As A Disciplinarian Of International Organizations, Kristina Daugirdas

Articles

As a disciplinarian of international organizations, reputation has serious shortcomings. Even though international organizations have strong incentives to maintain a good reputation, reputational concerns will sometimes fail to spur preventive or corrective action. Organizations have multiple audiences, so efforts to preserve a “good” reputation may pull organizations in many different directions, and steps taken to preserve a good reputation will not always be salutary. Recent incidents of sexual violence by UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic illustrate these points.

Assigning Protection: Can Refugee Rights And State Preferences Be Reconciled?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

The theoretically global responsibility to protect refugees is today heavily skewed, with just ten countries – predominantly very poor – hosting more than half of the world’s refugee population. Refugee protection has moreover become tantamount to warehousing for most refugees, with roughly half of the world’s refugees stuck in “protracted refugee situations” for decades with their lives on hold. Both concerns – the unprincipled allocation of responsibility based on accidents of geography and the desperate need for greater attention to resettlement as a core protection response – cry out for a global, managed system to protect refugees.

Introduction To Symposium On Unauthorized Military Interventions For The Public Good, Monica Hakimi

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On April 6, 2017, the United States launched fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles against an air base in Syria, after evidence surfaced that Bashar Al-Assad’s regime had again used chemical weapons against its people. President Trump announced that the strikes were intended “to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.” But as of this Symposium’s publication, the United States has not articulated a formal legal justification for the strikes. Instead, it reportedly circulated a document that listed several case-specific considerations that, in its view, justified the use of force. Yet the global reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Many states …

Toward A Legal Theory On The Responsibility To Protect, Monica Hakimi

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Over the past several decades, the central focus of international law has shifted from protecting only sovereign states to protecting individuals. Still, the worst imaginable human rights violations—genocides, ethnic cleansings, crimes against humanity, and systemic war crimes—occur with alarming frequency. And the international response is often slow or ineffectual. The most recent development for addressing this problem is the “responsibility to protect,” an idea that has received so much attention that it now goes simply by R2P. Almost all heads of state have endorsed R2P. The U.N. Secretary General has made R2P a top priority and issued multiple reports on …

Accountability And The Sri Lankan Civil War, Steven R. Ratner

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Sri Lanka's civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka's armed forces on a small strip of land in the island's northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter's rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian …

Administration Of Territories By The United Nations: Is There Room For International Humanitarian Law?, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

The fundamental starting point of this conference is that peace operations represent a challenge to the implementation of international humanitarian law (IHL) for the simple reason that IHL was developed for states conducting hostile military operations against other states or non state actors.

Administration of territories represents one subset of peace operations – continuation of second-generation peacekeeping (PK) where parties, typically prodded by outsiders, formally delegate to the United Nations (UN) authority for the implementation of a peace agreement – though it has also been extended to situations where final status and outcome are not sure, as with East Timor …

The War On Terrorism And International Humanitarian Law, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

My focus today is on the broad question of the so-called "war on terrorism" and how it fits within the framework of the rules of international humanitarian law. Are these laws applicable? There have been a variety of claims since September 11th that humanitarian law needs some kind of revision. Some making this claim assert that the current legal regime is too generous to terrorists, while others insist that it is too generous to governments. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has even convened various groups of experts to discuss this issue and the assumption among many has …

Making International Refugee Law Relevant Again: A Proposal For Collectivized And Solution-Oriented Protection, James C. Hathaway, R. Alexander Neve

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International refugee law is in crisis. Even as armed conflict and human rights abuse continue to force individuals and groups to flee their home countries, many governments are withdrawing from the legal duty to provide refugees with the protection they require. While governments proclaim a willingness to assist refugees as a matter of political discretion or humanitarian goodwill, they appear committed to a pattern of defensive strategies designed to avoid international legal responsibility toward involuntary migrants. Some see this shift away from a legal paradigm of refugee protection as a source for enhanced operational flexibility in the face of changed …

Rules Of Warfare, Edwin D. Dickinson

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Professor Dickinson anticipates the 1921 Conference of Washington on arms control and limitation in light of the recent world war and the special situations in the Far East. "War is abnormal, the negation of law and order, the exaltation of force..... This does not mean that codes of war law, so called, have no place or function ...."