The Extraterritorial Duty to Prevent Genocide at the Time of the Aggression against Ukraine: Open Questions 15 Years after the Bosnia v Serbia Case / Dr. Marco Longobardo
The Extraterritorial Duty to Prevent Genocide at the Time of the Aggression against Ukraine: Open Questions 15 Years after the Bosnia v Serbia Case
The seminar will address the extraterritorial duty to prevent genocide under international law, its content, its limitations, and its relations with the ban on the use of armed force. The reflection is occasioned by the fifteenth anniversary of the Bosnia v Serbia case, in which the International Court of Justice first described this duty, and by the Russian allegations of having invaded Ukraine last February to prevent an alleged genocide.
On 26 February 2007, the International Court of Justice affirmed that Serbia has not committed a genocide in Srebrenica, but nonetheless, it violated the UN Genocide Convention because it did not prevent the occurrence of a genocide there. This was the first time in which an international court affirmed that a state has the duty to prevent a genocide that is about to occur in the territory of another state. The findings of the Court have been discussed extensively and have contributed to the discourse about the responsibility to protect of states when a genocide is about to occur. However, fifteen years after that decision, it is time to shed some lights about the legal contours of the duty to prevent genocide, particularly with reference to the measures that a state is allowed to take to prevent a genocide that is about to occur in the territory of another state.
The need for clarification is particularly topical because on 24 February 2022, Russia lunched a war of aggression against Ukraine, alleging inter alia that the intervention was needed to prevent a genocide of Russian speaking inhabitants of eastern Ukraine. In response, Ukraine brought Russia before the International Court of Justice for abuse of the duty to prevent genocide. The case is pending and more than a dozen of third states decided to intervene.
26.10.22 / 14:15-15:45
https://minervaxtremelaw.haifa.ac.il/2022/09/25/the-prevention-of-genocide/
* (מצביחירום22-23) * (מינרבהקיצון22-23)