Several hundred European ISIS fighters, reportedly including nine British men and fifteen British women, have been held without trial by Syrian Kurdish forces for several years. The UK, like many European governments, are reluctant to repatriate their nationals, and would prefer them to be tried “where the crimes were committed”, concretely meaning prosecutions before the courts of the unrecognised administration of the Kurdish enclave in North-East Syria. Would such trials be lawful under international and European human rights law? How are the requirements of a fair trial transformed when transposed to the courts of a non-state armed group? Does human rights law impose extraterritorial obligations upon the state of nationality of these foreign fighters?
The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL) and the Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) held an online Rapid Response Seminar on the War in Ukraine on 7 March 2022. On the 24 February 2022 Russian troops launched a fully-fledged invasion of Ukraine after force had been used between the two countries in February 2014 with the annexing of Crimea by Russia. The UN General Assembly in its emergency session decided on 2 March 2022 that it: ‘[d]eplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter; demands that the Russian Federation immediately cease its use of force against Ukraine and to refrain from any further unlawful threat or use of force against any Member State; also demands that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders and [d]eplores the 21 February 2...
Lecture summary: In December 2020, the UK and five partners signed the 'Agile Nations Charter', reflecting its participants commitment to 'a more agile approach to rule-making ... to unlock the potential of innovation.' Around the same time, the World Economic Forum published a toolkit on 'Agile Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution'. The aspiration for regulatory agility is everywhere. This lecture charts the ways in which the 'agility agenda' has emerged across a range of spaces of governance, including the OECD, new generation FTAs, and regulator-to-regulator agreements, and asks how this agenda is reshaping regulatory governance at the global level. What is meant by 'agility', and how is it produced? What international legal forms and techniques are amenable to agility? What questions should we be asking, to guide research into, and thinking about, regulatory agility at the global level? Professor Andrew Lang joined the Edinburgh School of Law in 2017 as the Chair in International Law and Global Governance. Prior to that, he was Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He is an expert in Public International Law, with a specialty in International Economic Law and the Law of the World Trade Organization. He has a combined BA/LLB from the University of Sydney, where he was a double University Medallist, and his PhD is from the University of Cambridge.
Lecture summary: This lecture puts forward the conceptual argument that the transformative goals of the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against (CEDAW), which require states to eradicate root causes of injustice, can be made more effective not only through legislation and policy, as commonly argued, but through the judiciary. It highlights the need to develop the content and scope of transformative judicial obligations under CEDAW based on a comparative study of judicial decisions dealing with the abuse of female migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in three key MDW destinations that are CEDAW parties—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. By engaging with scholarship on CEDAW’s positive obligations, transformative equality, and theories of adjudication, it argues that criminal law courts should not only ensure the accountability and punishment of perpetrators but also ascertain and critique the laws, policies, and practices enabling MDW abuse in judicial decisions. While there is much scholarship on the nature of MDW abuse and regulation of domestic work, there has yet to be a CEDAW-focused comparative analysis of case law dealing with such abuse. This research thus addresses a gap in academic debates on MDW rights and the types of positive obligations owed by courts under CEDAW. Dr. Cheah W.L. is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2007. She holds academic qualifications from the National University of Singapore (LL.B., LL.M.), Harvard Law School (LL.M.), and Oxford University (D.Phil). She conducts research in the core disciplines of international criminal law, transitional justice, and human rights law with a focus on the intersections of law, culture, and power. Within these areas, her research explores the diverse and complex roles performed by domestic and international criminal courts beyond their paradigm aim of adjudicating on the guilt or otherwise of those charged with criminal offences. Her work has been accepted for publication in journals such as the Leiden Journal of International Law, European Journal of International Law, Michigan Journal of International Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Human Rights Quarterly, and Harvard Human Rights Journal. My publications and work may be found at: https://cheahwuiling.com/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1102439
Thursday, 28 October 2021 - 5.45pm Online webinar This lecture is part of the Cambridge Arbitration Society (CUArb)/Lauterpacht Centre for International Law lecture series. Speakers: Iain Mckenny, Profile Investment & Louis Young, Augusta Ventures Chair: Ibrahim Alturki
Lecture summary: Dame Sally will explore global governance for health using the two pandemics of COVID 19 and Antimicrobial Resistance as exemplars highlighting the importance of data and innovation. Dame Sally Davies is the 40th Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University, the UK Government’s Special Envoy on AMR and the chair of The Trinity Challenge, which she set up in May 2020. Before this, from March 2011 to September 2019, she was Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government. Dame Sally was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board 2014-2016 and led delegations to a range of WHO summits and forums since 2004. Dame Sally advocates globally on AMR: for three years, Dame Sally was the chair of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on AMR and later co-convener of the UN Inter-Agency Co-ordination Group on AMR, set up in response to the AMR declaration made at UNGA 2016. Dame Sally is a member of the UN Global Leaders Group on AMR, since 2020, serving alongside Heads of State, Ministers and prominent figures from around the world. Dame Sally is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US Academy of Science. In the 2020 New Year’s Honours, Dame Sally was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) for services to public health and research, having received her DBE in 2009.
Speakers: Can Yeginsu – Barrister, 4 New Square Dr Hayk Kupelyants – Associate, Dechert
Speakers: Samaa Haridi – Partner, Hogan Lovells Prof Anne Marie Whitesell – Professor, Georgetown University
We are hoping to discuss International Law and poverty, both in terms of the role international law plays in constituting systems of inequality and destitution, and in terms of its potential as to provide a remedy. Throughout the session we will explore the ways in which critical scholarship simultaneously opens up and forecloses the possibility of transforming international law from within. The event will last one hour. Marina and Francisco will lead the conversation for ~40 minutes after which they will pass the pleasure and responsibility on to the audience. Speaker Biography Michael Fakhri is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law where he teaches courses on human rights, food law, development, and commercial law. He is also the director of the Food Resiliency Project in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center. He holds a Doctorate from the University of Toronto, Masters from Harvard Law School, Bachelor of Laws from Queen’s University, and a Bachelor of Science in Ecology from Western University. During his practice as a lawyer, Mr. Fakhri fought for the rights of people who were indigent and incarcerated in a psychiatric institution. More recently, his book Bandung, Global History, and International Law (co-edited with Vasuki Nesiah and Luis Eslava) was cited by the International Court of Justice. He was appointed Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food by the Human Rights Council in March 2020 and assumed his functions on 1 May 2020.
Offshore exploitation of oil and gas started in the 1930s and thousands of installations are distributed around the world. Offshore installations threaten the environment, not only when it comes to oil spills, which are most visible but admittedly rare, but also in relation to their contribution to marine debris, pollution by dumping and greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the construction, operation and decommissioning of offshore installations, in the energy sector and beyond, is one of the maritime economic activities that has not yet been comprehensively regulated at the global level. The relevant international legal framework consists of a plethora of instruments adopted at the global, regional and supranational level, which have developed in different institutional settings and following different formats. The result is that, first, there is no specialised framework convention and consequently, the legal framework is fragmented at the sectoral, institutional, geographical and issue-related level. Second, the legal framework is weak because of the non-binding nature of many of the instruments that are the outcome of unconventional lawmaking1 processes. Third, the lawmaking processes in this field seem to be industry-led because of the important role the industry plays in unconventional lawmaking, both within and outside conventional fora.2 While unconventional lawmaking processes guarantee flexibility and the needed timeliness of regulatory efforts for a sector in continuous development and expansion, they do not necessarily allow for safeguarding or constructing the coherence of the legal framework. Moreover, the processes might be abused to push forward the agenda of the strongest actors, at the expense of global commons such as the marine environment and climate. In order to support these submissions, the present chapter will proceed in four steps. First, it will briefly introduce the existing conventional legal framework and highlight its fragmentation at the material and geographical levels. Special attention will be dedicated to the mechanisms for the further development of the law contained in the analysed instruments, e.g. rules of reference and monitoring mechanisms. Second, the analysis will concentrate on unconventional lawmaking performed by conventional actors, namely competent international organisations and treaty-bodies, with a focus on the standards for the conduct of environmental impact assessment. Third, the chapter will analyse the role of private actors, namely the industry, in unconventional lawmaking. Self-regulation plays an important role in the offshore energy sector. Codes of conducts adopted by multinational corporations, guidelines and recommendations drafted by professional associations highly influence the legal framework, also at the international level. A special mention will be made here to the renewable energy sector and the role of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) as an example of an industry-led international organisation that has only produced unconventional law so far. Fourth, the legal nature of the outcomes of unconventional lawmaking will be analysed in light of their relationship to the existing conventional instruments. Specifically, it will be considered whether the unconventional lawmaking in the offshore energy sector has an autonomous normativity or whether their ‘being law’ derives from their interpretative function of applicable binding instruments. Some concluding remarks will be presented in order to highlight how unconventional lawmaking contributes to the fragmented and weak nature of the existing international legal framework. Seline Trevisanut (PhD, University of Milan; MA, Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne) is Professor of International Law and Sustainability at Utrecht University since 2018. She joined Utrecht University in 2012 as Marie Skłodowsk...