LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

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.

Lecture summary: Grotius is not generally considered a state theorist, but a theorist and jurist of natural law. But his accounts of natural right, sociability and sovereign power – all building blocks of his carapace of a natural legal order – generate also an exoskeleton of political order that leans upon but is not reducible to the legal order of natural law. As such, Grotius's juristic sensibility and his Roman legal methods, generate not so much a political theory of the state as a set of generative parameters for the conceptualization of the state in which the concrete constitution of state authority is historical and plural, even as it is integrated into a universal legal order. State authority is made possible and accountable under a system of natural legal right, even as its constitution is a historical achievement that should not readily be disturbed and in which a large range of freedom and unfreedom is lawful and should be accepted.Grotius theory of the state holds important lessons and implications for our contemporary world, where over the last 25 years we have grappled constantly with the problem of what a state is, the circumstances under which we might justifiably breach its sovereignty, and the profound difficulties of re-making state orders when they have failed, collapsed or been destroyed by foreign intervention.Professor Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law. Prior to the EUI he was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Nehal’s two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press with Beck, Geiss, Liu and Kress). Nehal works on a wide range of doctrinal, historical and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law. He is about to start work as a General Editor (with Anthony Pagden and Mira Siegelberg) of The Cambridge History of Rights (5 volumes).

Lecture summary: In 2017, the British Government ratified the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict (henceforth, the Hague Convention). This Convention, along with its two Additional Protocols, sets out the obligations of states with respect to cultural heritage in war. War throws up a range of conflicts between protecting people and protecting heritage, in terms of both the use of resources, and the imposition and incurring of risk. And yet, from UNESCO to the Blue Shield, those working in heritage insist that such conflicts between people and heritage are impossible. For example, Irina Bokova, the former director-general of UNESCO, claims that, “there is no need to choose between saving lives and preserving cultural heritage: the two are inseparable.”In this talk, I argue that the failure to recognise these conflicts comprehensively undermines the heritage community’s response to the legal demands made by the Hague Convention. If we refuse to acknowledge that these conflicts can even in principle arise, we are ill-equipped to deal with them. Given that the Hague Convention requires combatants to deal with them, this is a pressing problem.