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Dawei DING
Starting in April 2018, a two years research project, hosted at the University of Geneva and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative Public Law and Public International Law in Heidelberg, will look at the protection of animals in times of armed conflicts. The project will be coordinated by Jérôme de Hemptinne, Lecturer at the Geneva Academy, under the Direction of Robert Kolb, Professor at the University of Geneva and at the Geneva Academy. It will be linked to the research project ‘Global Animal Law’ at Max Planck.
In times of war, the first instinct is to relieve the suffering of human beings. Environmental and animal interests are always pushed into the background. However, warfare also strongly affects natural resources, including animals, which makes wildlife issues a matter of great concern. Habitat destruction and the resulting disappearance of animals often threaten the survival of populations affected by hostilities.
‘Over the last 50 years, certain species have been vanishing at a very high rate because of wars, with often disastrous effects on the food chain and on the balance of nature. Indeed, as recently emphasized by a report published in the Journal Conservation Biology, during this period, 80 per cent of armed conflicts have taken place in countries – such as Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda or Vietnam – that contain areas of high global species diversities’ underlines Jérôme de Hemptinne.
Being deeply anthropocentric, international humanitarian law (IHL) largely ignores questions relating to the protection of animals during armed conflicts. This research project precisely aims at filling this gap by producing an edited scholarly volume on this issue.
The Geneva Academy will host the second international conference of this project, scheduled to take place two months before the end of the project, to discuss the volume’s final draft and examine the relevance and feasibility of legislative proposals.
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Brill Publishers
Two alumni of our LLM in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Dražan Djukić and Niccolò Pons, are the editors of an important volume on international humanitarian law that has just been published by Brill Publishers.
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Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli human rights lawyer, will give two lectures in the week of 26 February, one on his new book and the other one on the new trends and challenges related to the protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
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ICRC
This short course discusses the extent to which states may limit and/or derogate from their international human rights obligations in order to prevent and counter terrorism and thus protect persons under their jurisdiction.
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This short course aims to study, in depth, an emblematic example of the complexity of international humanitarian law and the challenges it raises: the classification of armed conflicts.
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This project looked at how to enhance compliance by armed non-state actors with international norms, taking into account the views both of the actors themselves and the experiences of those engaged in dialogue with them.
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MSF
This research aims at building a common understanding and vision as to how states and the relevant parts of the UN system can provide a concrete and practical framework to address human rights responsibilities of armed non-state actors.
