Latest in United Nations Human Rights Council
Facebook’s Oversight Board presents itself as an executor of the global public interest embedded in international law. But in reality, the board uses international law in an imaginative and incoherent fashion, often widely reinterpreting its principles and instruments.
Human rights and counterterrorism have been dramatically politicized and undermined at the United Nations over the past 18 months. In a spate of recent resolutions, the 47-member Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva and the General Assembly in New York have both retreated markedly from many of the hard-won normative gains in their earlier resolutions after 9/11, following concerted lobbying by the likes of Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia—regimes not known for respecting rights in counterterrorism.
Politicians, trial lawyers and drafters of reports learn early on that framing an argument is central to the task of persuasion. And so it goes for the report by the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the border confrontation that occurred last spring between Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the tens of thousands of Gaza residents who sought to force their way into Israel by breaching the security barrier.
Start of Hodeidah Offensive Reinforces Humanitarian Concerns
Despite the many tumultuous events that have transpired in both the Middle East and the rest of the world since 2014, the conflict that erupted during that summer between Israel and Palestinian armed groups, particularly fighting involving Hamas in Gaza, continues to have importance with respect to the politics of the region, as well as the law and policy in the conduct of armed operations by all sides.
One of the basic tenets of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) is the equal application of the laws: as Professor Adam Roberts