Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar 'Digital Rights and AI-Enhanced Surveillance in Occupied Palestinian Territory: Limitations and Obligations' by Dr. Mais Qandeel, on Monday, 12th May, at 12.00 in the Faculty Room.
'AI-enhanced surveillance, such as face recognition technology, is used as a tool to collect mass amounts of data in both times of peace and war. In situations of belligerent occupation, where surveillance takes a form of alien domination and subjugation, occupying powers heavily rely on collecting personal and sensitive data, including biometrics, to monitor and control the occupied people, the protected persons under international humanitarian law (IHL) as well as to facilitate possible cyber operations. IHL, particularly, the law of belligerent occupation, does not provide for a comprehensive framework on whether the occupying power has the authority to collect, retain and disclose data nor how to maintain strict usage of AI-enhanced surveillance. This seminar examines the legality of mass datafication of occupied people and determines potential restraints on and obligations of the occupying power under the general principles of the law of belligerent occupation. The discussion focuses on the Occupied Palestine as a case study.'
About the speaker:
Dr. Mais Qandeel is an Associate Professor of International Law/ Law and Technologies at Örebro University, Sweden, with more than 15 years of experience at national and international human rights organizations/institutions. She holds a Ph.D. in international humanitarian law from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
She has worked extensively on issues related to international humanitarian law and human rights, and her research has three themes: i) the question of Palestine under belligerent occupation, ii) the implications of new technologies on human rights – human rights in cyberspace in connection with cyber norms and cybersecurity - and the rule of law, and iii) the protection of the natural environment in situations of armed conflicts.
A warm welcome to PRIVIGO Brown Bag Seminar, on May 20th, at 12-14.
More details will be added here as soon as possible.
“Ethos, Craft, Praxis, and Community: The TALS Academy and Reflections on Scholarship in International Law”, will be presented by Marta Paricio Montesinos, on Friday, 14 March.
In this session, Marta Paricio will share insights from her participation in The Academy in Advanced Legal Research & Method (TALS Academy), an initiative by the Transnational Association of Legal Scholars (TALS) and the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law of the University of Melbourne. The Academy brings together selected participants for an intensive week of training on legal methods, as well as informal discussions with senior scholars on the craft of legal scholarship. At its core, its aim is to foster a critical ethos and a sense of academic community in international law.
The seminar will be divided into two parts:
A brief overview of the Academy’s structure and key takeaways, aimed at PhD students interested in applying, as well as a broader reflection on different approaches to organizing academies and summer schools.
An open discussion on the themes of ethos, craft, praxis, and community in international legal scholarship. Using the example of the writing workshop and its potential role in fostering academic ethos, the presenter will pose questions on the state of academia, the challenges and opportunities we face, and the role of international law researchers today.
Rather than a formal presentation, the aim is to engage in an open and informal conversation, encouraging participants to share their personal reflections.
Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar on “International Organisations and Social Responsibility” by Viljam Engström on 30 April 2025, at 12.00 in P545 (Porthania, Yliopistonkatu 3).
Viljam Engström (PhD, Adjunct professor) works as Research leader in International law at Åbo Akademi University. His research is focused on international organizations/institutions in different settings and from various perspectives.
For an overview article on the theme of the presentation, please see "Twenty-First-Century Crises and the Social Turn of International Financial Institutions" (open access).
Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar "Dealing with regime complexity: Legal Aspects of the Coordination and Cooperation between International Organizations" by Sarah Tonani Pereira Cançado Ribeiro on Thursday, 17 October, at 11.00 in P545.
In the last 75 years, international organizations have grown in number and in scope of functions, that led them to play an important role in the creation and maintenance of international regimes. These enlarged functions tend to overlap and create the need for coordination and cooperation between international organizations to solve real world problems at the intersection of regime complexes. Legal literature has, however, only focused on the judicial and normative aspects of this phenomenon. In this context, the research project proposes to study institutional law aspects of the cooperation and coordination between international organizations, such as powers, competences, accountability and applicable legal principles. This may help to clarify the applicable legal framework, identify emerging practices and possible shortcomings to be remedied.
Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar " Latest developments in accountability mechanisms of IOs when conducting contractual activities” by Elisabetta Morlino on Wednesday, 18 September, at 10.00 in P722.
Elisabetta Morlino is Full Professor of Administrative and Environmental Law at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples, IT.
She is currently Senior Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice of the NYU School of Law and adjunct professor at the Global School of Law of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa of Lisbon and at the Université Catholique of Lille. Previously, she has been adjoint professor at the University of SciencePo (Paris), at the LUISS Guido Carli (Rome) and at the Academy of European Public Law of the European Public Law Organization (Athens).
She has been appointed Jemolo Fellow at the Nuffield College of the University of Oxford for the a.y. 2024-2025.
Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar "Indirect Aggression and the North Atlantic Treaty” by Walter Rech on Thursday, 12 September, at 11.00 in P545.
In 1948–1949, diplomats and policymakers involved in the negotiations of the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) did not believe that the Soviet Union would plan an armed attack against the western bloc in the near future. Instead, they were deeply worried about Soviet ‘indirect aggression’ in the form of political infiltration, subversion and electoral interference, that is, hybrid operations. The question spontaneously arises of why the notion of indirect aggression was eventually dropped during the NAT negotiations, whereas Art. 5 on collective defense against armed attack became the core provision of the treaty.
Walter Rech is a senior researcher at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and currently a Lecturer in International Law.
The first academic event of this year is the ECI Brown Bag seminar with Angelina Fisher on Ocean Governance, 5 August, 12-14 in P545.
Angelina Fisher is Adjunct Professor of Law and the director of Policy & Practice of the Guarini Law & Tech initiative. She is the founder of the International Organizations Clinic and the Guarini Global Legal Practice in Digital Society Externship. She also directs the Institute for International Law and Justice Joyce Lowinson Scholars Program. Her research interests lie in the intersection of international organizations, digital technologies, development studies, and international human rights. She is also studying the role of data and knowledge infrastructures in governance of oceanic activities, including deep-sea mining. Fisher holds an LL.B from Osgoode Hall Law School and an LLM in International Legal Studies from New York University School of Law. Prior to joining the Institute for International Law and Justice, she was a Helton Fellow at Human Rights First, focusing on U.S. and international law related to counterterrorism operations and national security policy and practice. In 2004-2005, she was a Research Scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University School of Law. She has also worked was an associate at the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling, LLP.
Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar "I love my life”: Facebook as a space for re-socialization of war criminals" by Olivera Simic on Monday, 27 May, at 14.00 in P545
Studies on rehabilitation of war criminals undertaken so far assess how the rehabilitation of perpetrators of international crimes is being evaluated at domestic level and how it compares to international practices at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal tribunals (IRMCT). This paper aims to diverge from this conventional focus and take a bottom-up approach to explore how war criminals re-socialise after serving or escaping their prison sentence. In absence of rehabilitation programs for international war criminals, convicted war criminals from the former Yugoslavia devised their own ways to re-enter mainstream society. Together with the war criminals who are on the run, most of them entered the social media public space not concealing their identity and regularly post about their daily lives and encounters. They also communicate with each other via these networks.
Their victims can also be tracked down and found on the same media platforms. War criminals and their victims thus share the same spaces and can follow each other’s lives. For some victims, Facebook represents their investigative tool for searching their perpetrators who are at large and sought after by the Interpol or domestic courts. As I will show, most convicted war criminal not only reveal their identity and affiliation with armed or paramilitary forces they once belonged to but are proud of it. Their narratives feed directly into the politics of their nation states which celebrate rather than condemn its war criminals.
Dr. Olivera Simic is Associate Professor with the Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Australia and Visiting Fellow with Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, Belfast. Dr Simic published four monographs and numerous co-edited collections, book chapters, journal articles and personal narratives that cut across the themes of international law, transitional justice and gender. Her latest monograph Lola’s War: Rape Without Punishment was published by MacMillan in 2023. Her draft monograph about Biljana Plavsic, the only woman prosecuted for crimes against humanity by the ICTY is currently under review with the publisher.
Warm welcome to the ECI internal Brown Bag Seminar with Martti Koskenniemi ‘Gaza in the ICJ: Into a New World?’ on 23 May, at 14-16 in P545.
A warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar by Ukri Soirila on Tuesday, 07 May, at 11.00 in P545.
During the past few decades, international organizations have increasingly started to engage in entrepreneurial market activities and to adopt practices and mindsets from the private sector. In so doing, they have challenged some of the commonly held assumptions of the international organizations law, such as the ideas that international organizations mainly perform technical tasks delegated to them by their member states, and that they do so in the public interest. In my talk, I will introduce the broad picture of my research related to the topic. Among other things, I will give examples of the market activities of international organizations and analyse the historical, material, and ideological context in which the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ has occurred.
The presentation is based on Ukri’s post-doctoral research as part of the ERC-funded PRIVIGO project.
Warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar The Development of Cultural Heritage in International Law with Pauno Soirila on Tuesday, 30 April at 12.00 in P545.
By the beginning of the 21st century, cultural heritage had become a global phenomenon, playing a major role in tourism and identity politics. Despite it often being celebrated as an apolitical, common good, cultural heritage is laden with political tensions and values and is developed through politicized mechanisms. This paper gives an overview the development of cultural heritage legislation in international law and the way international politics has shaped its course, most of all in UNESCO. Decolonization, human rights, and Global North/South dynamics have all played an important part in the shaping of the field of cultural heritage legislation in the 20th century, while its beginnings can be found in the rules of war in the 19th century and the work of the League of Nations
A kind reminder of next week’s Brown Bag Seminar "Of Revolution and Reaction: The Decolonization-Era Third-Worldism and the Politics of Knowledge Production in International Law" by Soheil Ghasemi on 29 April, at 12.00 in P545.
The dawn of political decolonization following World War II marked and coincided with the birth of the first generation of Third-Worldist scholarship and the arrival of new figures and academic institutions in the discipline of international law. In the span of three decades from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, the ensuing “battle for international law” not only permeated the discipline’s classic knowledge production institutions and “gatekeepers” such as research institutions, journals, and scholarly networks but also prompted the emergence of new Third-World-based academic institutions, each inspired by their specific locally contingent struggles and ideological sensibilities. As an intra-disciplinary intellectual lineage, Third-Worldism saw the light of day in the post-war “golden age” of academia and collided, intersected, and conversed with a myriad of transnational (counter-)projects involving a varying range of actors such as peripheral and heterodox academics and institutions, lawyer-politicians in the Third World, think tanks and philanthropic foundations, and transdisciplinary epistemic encounters with social sciences disciplines. Against this backdrop, through a sociological lens into the disciplinary history based on multi-sited archival research and interviews, this project traces the historic ebb and flow of the first generation of Third-Worldist scholarship. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, the neo-Bourdieusian historical sociology of transnational and colonial fields, as well as Andrew Abbott’s processual sociology of academic disciplines, this research seeks to go beyond a purely political and diplomatic historiographical account of Third-Worldism and decolonization by juxtaposing multiple episodes, actors, and interlocking layers of the institutional landscape of international legal discipline within this period together with institution-building projects and distinct variations of Third-Worldism that peripheral international lawyers developed in Egypt, India, and Iran.
Soheil Ghasemi is a PhD candidate in International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, Switzerland. He holds an undergraduate degree in Law from the University of Tehran and a Master’s degree in International Law from the Graduate Institute. His research interests include the global intellectual history of international law, peripheral histories of law, and the sociology of the international legal profession. This presentation is based on his PhD thesis.
A warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar on Strict liability, the Public/Private Divide, and Transnational Legal Policy by Ali Sharifi, a visiting researcher at the ECI, on Tuesday, 16 April, at 12.00 in P669.
"Strict liability" is primarily used to describe a form of liability where, unlike classic responsibility, no wrongful act is necessary. While the concept of "objective liability" is well-defined and clear in municipal law, it has proven to be controversial in international law. Unlike international responsibility for wrongful acts, which is less controversial and largely based on customary law, the very notion of international liability outside of conventional norms has been disputed. This rule is explicitly acknowledged in several conventional regimes, including nuclear, space, and oil pollution regimes. However, there is no consensus on the acceptance of this form of liability beyond conventional frameworks.
The International Law Commission (ILC) has examined this issue for almost thirty years. However, the outcome of its work, the 2006 Principles on the Allocation of Loss, has been heavily criticized by scholars. This criticism stems from both theoretical and practical difficulties. Theoretically, the ILC has been faulted for not properly defining the subject matter, particularly its relation to responsibility for wrongful acts. Additionally, liability raises complex questions about the interaction between public and private law. The ILC has largely excluded state liability from its Principles and instead advocates for the liability of private operators. This approach presents challenges regarding the role of the State.
Practically, the subject carries significant economic implications, particularly concerning transboundary industrial and technological damages. The economic challenges associated with the subject are considerable, given its close ties to environmental protection from transboundary harm.
Ali Sharifi is a Ph.d. candidate and a former Teaching and Research Fellow (ATER) at Strasbourg University. He has extensive experience in teaching and conducting research in domestic and international public law. Ali holds two master's degrees and a diplôme universitaire in international and comparative law. Additionally, he has completed internships at UNHCR and served as a coach for the Strasbourg Jessup Team, which achieved both championship and runner-up titles in France (2019-2020). The presentation is based on Ali’s doctoral research.
A warm welcome to the ECI Brown Bag Seminar on Regional Fisheries Management Organisations: Managing Fishing Stocks and Legal Interactions by Rita Guerreiro Teixeira on Wednesday, 20 March, at 11.00 in P545.
Current trends of overfishing and declining high seas fishery resources can only be reversed through international cooperation. To this end, states have largely chosen to cooperate through regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs), who have powers to adopt management and conservation measures that are binding on their member states. Their paradigm of regional cooperation, however, is challenged by the fact that fish stocks are not contained by legal borders. As a result, these organisations often find themselves having to reach beyond their membership and geographical scope to effectively pursue their mandates. In doing so, they establish numerous interactions between the international, regional, and national legal systems on the management and conservation of fisheries resources and coordinate efforts with actors in these three levels of governance—most notably the FAO, other RFMOs, states (including non-member states), and private actors.
This seminar and the working paper will map out and analyse these interactions, aiming to improve our understanding of RFMOs, their activities at the intersection of the international, regional, and national legal orders, and the different actors that participate in, and are affected by, their management measures. The analysis of the activities and functioning of these organisations offers a window into the interconnectedness that is required of international institutions today for an effective pursuance of their mandates—particularly in what concerns the management and conservation of shared natural resources. As such, the paper joins a growing body of literature that criticises the traditional approach to the study of international organisations (focusing almost exclusively on the relations with their member states and ignoring the outside world) and calls for a more contextual analysis of their activities and relationships.
The presentation is based on Rita’s post-doctoral research as part of the ERC-funded PRIVIGO project.