International law

In this press kit, you will find a selection of the European Parliament’s press releases reflecting MEPs’ priorities for topics on the summit agenda. Source : © European Union, 2024 - EP

• 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.

• The first "surprise" is that this year's conference dedicated a forum specifically to the issue of returning China's looted cultural relics.
• It is relatively rare that this year's meeting would focus on China's looted cultural relics and that Chinese scholars had been invited to present their views.
• The ASIL also took notice of this call and included it as one of the main themes of this year's meeting.
• The author is a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law and vice president of the China Society of Private International Law.

• The Tutsi were targeted primarily due to long-standing ethnic tensions between the Tutsi minority and the majority Hutu population.
• As the mass killings were happening, the international community stood by in a stupor, even though the nations of the world had a legal and moral obligation to intervene in cases of genocide.
• To its credit, the United Nations had already put in place a peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Unamir).
• In my view this was possible but would have required three main things: detailed intelligence, preventive measures and political will.

Detailed intelligence

• Unfortunately, the UN mission felt deaf and blind in the field as it did not have the analytical capacity to synthesise these important pieces of evidence.
• It was also prevented by UN headquarters from taking measures to secure more information and taking steps for prevention.

Preventive action

• Had the UN taken deterrent actions early on, it might have been able to stop the genocide at the outset.
• Later, a large deployment of troops would have been needed to bring a halt to the many senseless killings.
• UN preventive actions should have dealt with people (both plotters and resisters), the genocide structures (networks) and the tools (weapons) of the genocide.
• In response to illicit weapons flowing into Kigali, the peacekeeping force should have firmly applied the embargo.
• Quick, decisive action by the UN might have isolated the genocide to the Kigali sector before it spread into the countryside.

Political will

• The simple answer is a lack of political will.
• The lack of US commitment was largely the result of a disastrous mission in Somalia the previous year.
• Still, these peacekeepers managed to save 20,000 to 30,000 lives, showing what dedicated action from a small force can achieve.

Moving forward

• Primarily it is a matter of fostering a sense of enlightened self-interest among all nations, linking human welfare around the globe with one’s own.
• It means recognising that when crimes against one section of humanity are committed, no matter where, it is a crime against all of humanity.
• If this isn’t enough, then the fear of inaction should also be a motivating force.

Walter Dorn receives a salary and funding from the Department of National Defence.