November 13, 2024“Legal Education, International Law and Respect for International Human Rights in the Americas”

Featuring:
James Cavallaro
Professor of the Practice, Wesleyan University: Co-Founder and Executive Director, University Network for Human Rights.

This presentation (and subsequent paper) seeks to address the relationship between legal education, public international law (and in particular, human rights law), and the incorporation of these standards by countries in the Americas in domestic law, practice and in their international relations. First, we consider the extent to which public international law and human rights are taught in the legal academy across the Americas (focusing on the largest nations). To what extent are legal professionals trained to be familiar with international public law and human rights standards? We then consider the degree to which human rights standards are incorporated into domestic legal standards (beginning with the national constitution of states in the Americas). Finally, we seek to draw connections between the study of human rights standards in law school, the incorporation of these standards into domestic law and their application in international relations. We anticipate that low levels of study will lead to lower levels of constitutional incorporation and reference to, and application of, human rights standards in international relations. We also suspect that increased levels of instruction in public international law and human rights may promote greater application of these norms in the Americas.

October 17, 2024
“Victim: Gender as Tool and Weapon”

Featuring:
Vasuki Nesiah
Professor of Practice, Galatin School, New York University

Abstract
This chapter is a window into the work of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in relation to the International Criminal Court. ICF is a project of ideas and passions, legal proposals and policy orientations; in making knowledge claims about women in conflict it is also helping to interpolate that subject position. This intervention looks at the political purchase of ICF as part of the normative framework guiding and legitimizing “counterterrorism” policies with particular attention to how these have intersected with the work of the ICC in new modalities of lawfare. Against the backdrop of SC action, including its military interventions in Muslim-majority countries, I argue that the driving logics of ICF and ICL have come together in reinforcing and further legitimating hegemonic approaches to counterterrorism, including their often latent, but frequently explicit, Islamophobia. This chapter pays particular attention to how lawfare got defined in contexts such as Afghanistan and Mali, with particular attention to the Al-Hassan case at the ICC as the grain of sand through which we examine the universe at the crossroads of sharia panic, sex panic and security panic.

Respondent:
Jelena Golubović
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and International Affairs
Northeastern University, College of Social Sciences and Humanities

October 10, 2024
“An Abolitionist Critique of Human Rights: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence”

Featuring:
Karen Engle
Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair, Professor of Law, Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapport Center for Human Rights and Justice, University of Texas at Austin School of Law 

Abstract:
Contemporary international human rights law increasingly obligates states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized and homophobic violence. This book uses a prison and police abolitionist lens to challenge this trend. It focuses on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that the Court’s reliance on criminalization threatens to undo earlier European approaches to penality that resonate with abolitionist thought. It also contends that the criminalization approach provides the Court with an alibi for not recognizing or attending to the deeply structural racialized, colonial, sexual, gendered, and homophobic violence in Europe, particularly but not only against Roma communities and Black and Muslim migrants.  Challenging human rights advocates and judges to take seriously prison and police abolition in Europe and elsewhere, the book (re)introduces the insights of European penal abolitionists from the 1970s, considering them alongside more recent U.S. abolitionist activism and thought that attends more explicitly to racialized and gendered violence. It calls for the ECtHR to bolster the penal minimalism found in some of its caselaw and pave the way for an anti-carceral turn among human rights courts

Northeastern Respondent:
Daniel Medwed
University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice

September 26, 2024
“Siege Starvation: A War Crime of Societal Torture”

Featuring:
Tom Dannenbaum
Associate Professor of International Law, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Abstract:
Starvation in war is resurgent. Recently or currently, it has devastated populations in Ethiopia, Palestine, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere. The practice has also drawn the scrutiny of the United Nations Security Council. And yet, what precisely is criminally wrongful about starvation methods remains underspecified. A common way of thinking about the criminal wrong is as a form of killing or harming civilians. Although its differentiating particularities matter, the basic wrongfulness of the crime inheres, on this view, in it being an attack on those who ought not be attacked. For some, this supports a broad interpretation of the starvation ban. However, for others, the graduality of starvation preserves the continuous possibility of the avoidance or minimization of civilian death or harm in a way that direct kinetic attacks do not. In combination with the method’s purported military utility, this incrementalism has underpinned arguments for the permissibility of certain forms of siege and other deprivation and a narrow interpretation of the starvation crime. Drawing on the moral philosophy of torture, Tom Dannenbaum rebuts these arguments and offers a distinctive normative theory of the crime. Starvation, like torture, is peculiarly wrongful in its distortion of victims’ biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love. This process does not merely raise the cost of fulfilling those commitments. Instead, starvation tears gradually at the very capacity of those affected to prioritize their most fundamental commitments, regardless of whether they would choose to do so under the conditions in which choice is a coherent concept. Rather than palliating, the slowness of starvation methods is at the crux of this torturous wrong. Recognizing this redefines the meaning and place of the crime in the framework of international criminal law.

Northeastern Respondent:
Denise Garcia
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs