Geneva Academy
17 September 2019
Joshua Niyo, Teaching Assistant at the Geneva Academy and PhD Candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies received the best paper prize at the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) 2019 Conference for his paper ‘Legal Obligations for Armed Non-State Actors: Can IHL and IHRL Learn from Each Other?’.
The 2019 AHRI Conference, which took place at the University of Potsdam and brought together academics working on international humanitarian law (IHL) and human rights, focused on the challenges ahead for human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL) 70 years after the adoption of the Geneva Conventions.
Joshua Niyo is the first recipient of this new prize, which follows a call for paper launched back in January 2019.
The paper explores the principal areas of concern regarding the practical outworking of an IHL /international human rights law mutually enforcing paradigm with regard to the protection of life and personal liberty. Specifically, it addresses targeting and the requirement to investigate the loss of life and the legality of detention in non-international armed conflicts with regard to organized armed non-state actors.
Joshua Niyo presented the paper during a panel on the doctrine of IHL and international humanitarian law.
‘It was a great opportunity to engage on the legacy of the 1949 Geneva Conventions now at 70. The scope of the papers presented was both broad and in-depth, with the phenomenon of armed non-state actors taking some prominence. I thank God for this achievement and the organizers for selecting me and I hope my paper and this prize contributes to the general discourse on the need to engage with these actors in the context of international law’ underlines Joshua Niyo.
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International lawyers, social scientists, security experts, and humanitarian practitioners discussed how research in social sciences could inform IHL experts and humanitarian practitioners to assess whether a certain degree of cooperation between organized armed groups – referred to as a ‘coalition’ – had relevance for armed conflict classification.
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Applications for the 2024–2025 academic year of our LLM in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights are open. They will run until 26 January 2024 for applications with a scholarship and until 24 February 2024 for applications without a scholarship.
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Participants in this training course, made of two modules, will examine the major international and regional instruments for the promotion of human rights and the environment, familiarizing themselves with the respective implementation and enforcement mechanisms.
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This training course will examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights have been utilized to advance the concept of business respect for human rights throughout the UN system, the impact of the Guiding Principles on other international organizations, as well as the impact of standards and guidance developed by these different bodies.
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This project will explore humanitarian consequences and protection needs caused by the digitalization of armed conflicts and the extent to which these needs are addressed by international law, especially international humanitarian law.
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This initiative wishes to contribute to better and more coordinated implementation, reporting and follow-up of international human rights recommendations through a global study on digital human rights tracking tools and databases.
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