UN

• Iran’s attack involved around 170 drones, over 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles, all directed against Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
• But various options have been canvassed, including a strike of some sort against Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.
• It has assassinated a number of nuclear scientists over the years, and launched a number of attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities.
• Believed to have been created through collaboration between US and Israeli intelligence, the Stuxnet malware was designed to severely disrupt centrifuge operations at Natanz and is thought to have set back Iran’s nuclear weapons programme by years.

Iran’s nuclear weapons history

• The country developed a civil nuclear programme under the late Shah, and in 1970 ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, committing the country not to possess nor develop nuclear weapons.
• During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Iran pursued a secret nuclear weapons development project, known as the Amad Plan.

• But it is thought that by then, Iran had the capacility to build a small and fairly crude nuclear device.
• A great deal of what we know about the development of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme stems from the 2018 Mossad raid.
• This revealed that work on weapons development was not entirely halted, and that Iran continued to work on improving its nuclear weapons capability.
• It has resumed operations at nuclear facilities previously prohibited under the terms of the agreement and, since February 2021, has prevented the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from effectively monitoring its nuclear sites.

Can an Iranian ‘bomb’ be prevented?

• First, Iran possesses the requisite expertise to develop nuclear weapons, which cannot be eradicated through bombing raids.
• While targeting Iranian facilities would temporarily hinder the programme, any setbacks would likely be short-lived.
• Destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz would be essential, but accessing these facilities would necessitate a significant number of airstrikes penetrating deep into Iranian territory, while circumventing or overpowering its air defence systems.

Christoph Bluth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• In The Trial of Vladimir Putin, barrister Geoffrey Robertson answers that question by dramatising what might happen within the walls of a future courtroom.
• The question of whether Putin is guilty of aggression is fairly straightforward.
• Evidence would be needed that he is responsible in his role as a commander for actions carried out by subordinates.
• Instead, a special aggression tribunal would have to be established in the tradition of the trials of Nazis at Nuremberg.

• It is not pure fiction; it is speculation informed by Robertson’s experience.
• The details he imagines will bring these potential future trials to life for readers who are less familiar than he is with the inside of a courtroom.
• Does Robertson really need to tell us three times that any judgements should be uploaded to the internet?

Rhetorical devices

• Whether Putin should be tried even if absent is a hard question because there are arguments on both sides.
• Instead, he uses rhetorical tools such as hyperbole: if “international law is to have any meaning”, he writes, then a trial in the defendant’s absence “must be acceptable”.
• Robertson criticises this with the remark that it “entitles a man who has given orders to kill thousands to stand back and laugh”.

• It is that he gives the impression that the complexities do not exist.
• Dismissive language is a more general feature of his writing style.
• The implication is that Robertson is atypical among lawyers, someone who will sweep aside conventions and assumptions.
• Read more:
  An inside look at the dangerous, painstaking work of collecting evidence of suspected war crimes in Ukraine

The United Nations

• One of the bolder elements in the book is what Robertson says about the United Nations.
• One of them is that the Security Council could authorise, say, the United States to take military action against another nuclear-armed major power: is that outcome “obviously right”?
• The same logic might be used to justify expelling the United States, Britain and Australia, which were accused of unlawfully invading Iraq in 2003.
• Robertson compares the UN unfavourably with its predecessor, the League of Nations, which “expelled the USSR for attacking Finland”.

Rowan Nicholson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• More than 70 years later, the world is more connected and the nature of migration and asylum has changed.
• UK home secretary James Cleverly (as well as his predecessor Suella Braverman) has suggested that such migration treaties are no longer fit for purpose.
• Cleverly did not mention that this proportion has been surprisingly stable over the past 60 years.
• Today, 70% of refugees are hosted in countries neighbouring where the people flee from.
• While a few countries take most of the responsibility for refugees, many others shun cooperation.

Political challenges

• Scholars have long explored the possibility of a legally binding mechanism to ensure that refugee protection is responsibly shared.
• But such a system seems impossible in the current political climate.
• The US, Australia and Italy all failed to endorse recent, non-binding, international agreements on responsibility-sharing for migration and refugee protection.
• Despite this political difficulty, there could be ways to incentivise states to take more responsibility, without a legally binding system.

From safety to integration

• More work needs to be done in host countries to help refugees integrate and avoid marginalisation and discrimination.
• This could be through cultural exchanges between citizens and refugees, such as sport, cooking or language classes.

Matilde Rosina does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• With the inauguration of our own “ProEnergy” solar park to the electricity grid in Kosovo in July 2023, the ProCredit group took an important step towards achieving climate neutrality.
• A number of other initiatives contributed to the reduction of ProCredit’s ecological footprint in 2023 and thus reinforced the group’s sustainability strategy.
• Furthermore, the ProCredit group was able to maintain its 100% recycling rate for paper waste and electronic waste in 2023.
• The Impact Report Package 2023 of the ProCredit group as well as the Annual Report 2023 are available as of today on the ProCredit Holding website in the Investor Relations section at: