LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: Like many other areas of work, international humanitarian practice and thinking are being transformed by digital technology and associated socio-technical practices. Institutional developments within the United Nations (UN) are telling. Just over ten years ago, the UN Secretary General announced the launch of the UN Global Pulse project, dedicating to enabling, showcasing and promoting the “scaled adoption of big data innovation for sustainable development and humanitarian action”. This project has since been advanced through Pulse Labs in Jakarta, Kampala and New York and one soon to be set up in Samoa. Other, cognate initiatives have been launched throughout the UN system. Prominent, international public-private collaborations aim to harness digital technology for humanitarian ends: initiatives such as the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. And more or less every major technology company across the world is investing in the humanitarian field: Facebook’s Data for Good initiative; Google.org’s Crisis Response work; and Alibaba’s collaboration with the World Food Program to develop Hunger Map LIVE are indicative examples. International humanitarianism is taking on new imperatives, protagonists, investments, techniques and objects of inquiry in connection with the expanding reach of the digital. Given the centrality of humanitarianism to the way that the international plane has been imagined, regulated, materialized and militarized throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, these shifts are worthy of close attention.This talk will present one chapter of a book project investigating this domain of ‘digital humanitarianism’ – a chapter concerned with maps and mapping. It focuses on recent shifts from two-dimensional mapping for humanitarian ends towards multi-dimensional, real-time mapping for the same purposes, associated with geographic information systems (GIS) and the generation and deployment of map cubes (multi-dimensional arrays of data values presenting cartographic visualization of each dimension). It offers a brief recollection of humanitarian mapping through “snapshots” from the practice in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (Valentine Seaman’s yellow fever maps; Charles Booth’s poverty maps; Bangladesh flood mapping; and the FAO’s Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping Systems). Against this background, we will consider the rise of crowd-sourcing as a digitally facilitated way of making cartographic knowledge for humanitarian governance purposes, as illustrated by the Missing Maps Project (a joint project of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – a U.S.-registered non-profit – and three other not-for-profit organizations: American Red Cross; British Red Cross; and Médecins Sans Frontières). We will explore how this affects how particular spaces are assembled, delimited, surveyed and readied for humanitarian intervention and with what implications for international legal relations and the jurisdiction of different actors on this terrain.Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law, working in the areas of public international law, legal theory, law and development, law and society (or socio-legal studies), and law and technology. Fleur studies emergent patterns of governance on the global plane, and their social, political and economic implications, employing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the social sciences and humanities and combines the study of public and private law. In 2021, Fleur will commence a four-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship working on a project entitled 'Diplomatic Knowledge, Disasters and the Future of International Legal Order'. In 2021-2022, Fleur will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Fleur is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Lecture summary: Recent scientific information presents an alarming diagnosis of the multiple adverse consequences of climate change on the ocean: levels of ocean acidification not seen in millions of years, changes in ocean chemistry, warming temperatures and deoxygenation threating marine life, in particular coral reefs; and rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets challenging the survival of some island States and threatening existing maritime boundaries and entitlements. There are two different applicable international regimes, one for the ocean and the other for climate change. Yet neither has a clear mandate for the ocean-climate nexus. The 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, often referred to as the Constitution for the oceans, negotiated before climate change emerged on the international agenda, makes no reference to climate change. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, with a clear mandate for atmospheric climate change, limits the role of the ocean to serving as sink or reservoir for greenhouse gases. The 2015 Paris Agreement added little more other than a preambular reference to ocean ecosystems.The lecture will examine whether and how these two principal legal regimes can meet the test for international law in providing a dialectic and evolutive response to the pressing challenges of the climate-ocean nexus.Nilüfer Oral is Director of the Centre of International Law (CIL) at the National University of Singapore and a member of the law faculty at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She is member of the UN International Law Commission and co-chair of the study group on sea-level rise in relation to international law. She served as climate change negotiator for the Turkish Ministry (2009 – 2016). She has also appeared before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Nilufer Oral is a Distinguished Fellow of the Law of the Sea Institute at Berkeley Law (University of California Law Berkeley); Senior Fellow of the National University of Singapore Law School; and Honorary Research Fellow at University of Dundee. Dr. Oral was elected to the Council of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (2012-2016) and served as Chair of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law (2014-2017). She is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the World Commission on Environmental Law.Dr Oral is the series editor for the International Straits of the World publications (Brill); member of the Board of Editors of the European Society of International Law Series; Board of Editors of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law; Associate Editor of the Research Perspectives in the Law of the Sea (Brill); and International Advisory Board, Chinese Journal of Environmental Law (Brill) She has published numerous articles edited several books, and has spoken at many international conferences.

Lecture summary: Visual international law tells stories. Image and art supporting imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also projected the authority, legitimacy, and universality of international law. This lecture argues that depictions of treaty-making, international legal theorists, and conferences were about painting European international law as ‘successful’—telling stories of an authoritative, universal, and virtue-laden mode of international regulation. That same approach also stretched into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including through the physical construction of international law in the architecture of its statement buildings, such as the International Court of Justice. Dr Kate Miles is a Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. She is the author of a monograph published by Cambridge University Press: The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment and the Safeguarding of Capital. She is also the author of a forthcoming monograph also with Cambridge University Press: Visual International Law: Image, Symbol, Art and Architecture. As an undergraduate in law and arts at the University of Auckland, she studied law, art history, philosophy and ancient history. She holds a B.A. in Art History, LL.B., and an LL.M. in Environmental Law (Hons I) from the University of Auckland, an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from NYU School of Law, and a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. Since 2015, her research has drawn together those interdisciplinary threads and engaged with the visuality of international law. In particular, it has focused on the role of the visual in projecting the authority, legitimacy and universality of imperial international law.

Lecture summary: Commander Ian Park (Royal Navy International Law Legal Adviser) will offer a view on the role of the military legal adviser during armed conflict and peacetime military operations. He will consider recent armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, and Royal Navy peacetime military operations in the Arabian Gulf and Mediterranean. Commander Ian Park is a logistics officer and barrister in the Royal Navy and has served in seven ships and deployed worldwide in support of the Royal Navy’s contribution to defence. He has also deployed as a legal adviser on operations to Afghanistan and, on many occasions, to the Middle East. Ian is, or has been, a Hudson Fellow at Oxford University, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, a First Sea Lord’s Fellow and a Freeman of the City of London. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has a doctorate in law from Balliol College, Oxford and has lectured at Harvard Law School, Cambridge University, Oxford University, The Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing, Hanoi University, USSH Hanoi and Freiburg University amongst other institutions. Ian is the author of, inter alia, ‘The Right to Life in Armed Conflict’ (Oxford University Press, 2018) and in 2018 was the winner of the outstanding performance by an HM Forces barrister at the UK Bar Awards.

Lecture summary: This lecture will explore how the Inter-American Court of Human Rights produces cognitive categories that deeply influence the way in which states, activists and victims understand their own reality, and decide their strategies therein. Moreover, it will discuss how the Inter-American Court triggers the production of domestic knowledge, which in turn influences the Court’s understanding of local reality, and the Court’s role in it. Further information: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-internationa... René Urueña is an Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Universidad de Los Andes School of Law (Colombia). He holds a doctoral degree (exima cum laude) from the University of Helsinki, has been several times an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and served as an adviser of the Selection Committee of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Colombia)

Lecture summary: This talk explores the history of decolonization from an economic and financial perspective. Through the examples of the French and British Empires, it shows that European settlers, officials, and other investors from North Africa and and East Africa in particular, removed assets from the colonial world upon decolonization. Yet when moving funds out of the imperial world, they often repatriated capital to a system of offshore tax havens in places such as Switzerland and the Bahamas rather than sending it to high-tax metropolitan countries like France and Britain. Decolonization thus fueled the expansion of tax havens that was taking place during these decades. This process of liquidating assets and removing capital moreover had important implications for the post-independence growth potential and development trajectory of newly independent so-called developing countries. The talk further asks what kind of effects such instances of capital flight from the colonial world had on the broader political economy of the 1950s-1970s both in the former colonial world and in metropolitan centers as well as the United States.Vanessa Ogle is associate professor of modern European history at the University of California - Berkeley, where she works on the history of capitalism, political economy, empire and decolonization, and legal history. She obtained her PhD from Harvard University and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Berkeley. Her first book, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Her current book project is Archipelago Capitalism: A History of the Offshore World, 1920s-1980s. It is the first archivally-based account of how the contemporary landscape of offshore tax havens, money markets, and flags of convenience shipping registries came into existence, with lasting implications for the rise of inequality throughout the twentieth century. Articles based off the project have appeared in the American Historical Review and most recently, in Past & Present.

Lecture summary: The current (and intensely fought) dispute over the ICC's jurisdiction in Palestine raises some interesting doctrinal and theoretical issues in international law, such as how Palestine can be considered a State for purposes of the Rome Statute while having not attained full independence or external self-determination.Once one places the ICC properly within the broader universe of international legal order, and applies the treaty interpretation principles of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, objections to jurisdiction that seem at first glance powerful, such as that Palestine is not really a State, are revealed to be on quite shaky ground.Professor Robert Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU School of Law. Professor Howse received his B.A. in philosophy and political science with high distinction, as well as an LL.B., with honours, from the University of Toronto, where he was co-editor in chief of the Faculty of Law Review. He also holds an LL.M. from the Harvard Law School. He has been a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne), Tsinghua University, and Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and taught in the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence.

This conversation will explore the relevance that analytical philosophy has played in contemporary international legal scholarship and the distinct contributions that it has and could offer — focusing on analytical moral and political philosophy. We will explore whether and why philosophical approaches from the analytical tradition have been displaced in recent decades (including in relation with ‘Continental’ approaches), the relationship between legal and normative (i.e., moral) considerations, and specific debates that might benefit from analytical philosophy perspectives. Focus will be placed on the role of philosophical argument in illuminating fundamental notions of international life such as self-determination and human rights, through to the key principles regulating whole regimes, such as the laws of armed conflict and the use of force, and the fair distribution of goods.Alejandro Chehtman is Professor of Law at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina) and a Fellow at the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET). He specializes in International Criminal Law, International Humanitarian Law, and on empirical work on courts and tribunals. His work has been published in the European Journal of International Law, Legal Theory, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Leiden Journal of International Law, Law & Philosophy, and the Journal of Law & Courts, among others. He published The Philosophical Foundations of Extraterritorial Punishment (Oxford University Press), and is currently finishing a monograph on A Theory of Asymmetrical Conflicts (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).

Speakers: Prof Carlos Esposito, University Autónoma of Madrid: "Privacy and New Technologies in the Time of COVID-19"Dr Calvin Ho, University of Hong Kong: 'Ethical and Regulatory Issues in the Vaccine Race'Prof Bartha Maria Knoppers, McGill University: 'The Right to Benefit From Science and Genomic Data Sharing in the Time of COVID-19'Prof Jorge Viñuales, University of Cambridge: 'Regulating new zoonotic disease outbreaks: international legal frames'Moderator: Dr Rumiana Yotova, University of Cambridge

Lecture summary: With the EU demand for continued access to the UK's exclusive economic zone for its fishing vessels seemingly the main outstanding condition for a trade agreement with the UK, this presentation first extracts from the eponymous White Paper and Bill [Act] a number of international legal issues that they raise, before moving on to further matters given only sketchy treatment in, or omitted altogether from, those documents, on which a firmer position ought to have been taken. Lastly, a new problem apparent for the first time in the Bill is discussed: navigational freedom of foreign fishing vessels in the UK EEZ, and a missed opportunity to legislate a related evidential presumption that would assist future prosecutions for illegal fishing.Professor Andrew Serdy is Professor of the Public International Law of the Sea at the University of Southampton.