LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: This talk uses the novel coronavirus pandemic as an entry point to explore the intersections between race and global health. The pandemic is simultaneously reviving stereotypical colonial imaginations about disease directionality, but also challenging racialized hierarchies of diseases. This lecture illuminates how the racialization of diseases is reflected in historic and ongoing...

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture will be given by Professor Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London Scho...

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture will be given by Professor Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London Scho...

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture will be given by Professor Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London Scho...

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 prom...

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 som...

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...

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...

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 underst...

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 oft...

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...

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...

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 n...

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...

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 sensibi...

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 her...

Lecture summary: Two Visions of the International Rule of Law: When we speak of the rule of law, we generally mean to describe the attributes that make law, as an enterprise, worthwhile--the qualities that lead us to aspire to live in a society governed by law. Though international lawyers commonly invoke the concept, we have devoted little attention to explaining what it entails or how it transla...

Lecture summary: The right to a fair trial is a right that enables the recognition and protection of many other human rights. Its violation can be devastating to an individual defendant, but also damaging to entire societies as unfair trials are used to undermine democracy and oppress minorities. Although the right to a fair trial has been included in all international and regional human rights in...

Professor Kedar will present his book Emptied Lands (co-authored with Amara and Yiftachel). Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international- comparative perspec...

Lecture summary: The lecture attempts to look at some important concepts and landmarks in international law and analyse how they have been impacted by developments in the field of women and children's rights. The sources of international law, sovereignty, state responsibility, human rights and the status of non state actors have all been transformed by issues concerning women and children. These d...

A series of conversations on international legal scholarship, political engagement and the transformative potential of academia. Each conversation will be chaired by Francisco José Quintana and Marina Veličković and will centre around a theme, concept or a method and their relationship to political movements, struggles and margins from which they have emerged and within (and for) which they have e...

Lecture summary: Over the last two years the court has faced a series of unprecedented challenges. We have seen a run of acquittals, case collapses, and greater and lesser scandals involving judges and the Office of the Prosecutor. While the Court has been buoyed by a number of significant convictions of rebellion leaders, momentum for an inquiry into the Court’s functioning and serious reform is...

Lecture summary: While the Rohingya genocide is one of the worst incidents against minorities in recent times, ethno-nationalism and minority oppression in various forms and intensities are defining features of postcolonial states in general. Whereas most states, including Western liberal democracies, are not completely immune from ethno-nationalism and the minority ‘problem’, question remains, wh...

Lecture summary: The presentation analyses an unprecedented new international moral and legal rule that forbids one state from hosting money stolen by the leaders of another state. The aim is to counter grand corruption or kleptocracy, when leaders of poorer countries loot billions of pounds at the expense of their citizens, and transfer the money to rich host countries like the UK, US and Switzer...

Lecture summary: The idea that all states are equal, however powerful or wealthy they might be, is an axiom of international law both in theory and in practice. Yet from Araribóia to Grenfell to Hodeidah to Nauru, the astonishing levels of violence and inequality that characterise our formally post-fascist, post-colonial, post-communist world are striking. Breaking with certain methodological conv...