The UN Security Council spends much of its time and resources addressing Non-International Armed Conflicts (or NIACs), the most prevalent form of armed conflict today. In so doing the Council frequently imposes binding obligations on the conflict parties. Some of these simply repeat existing obligations under international law. But the Council also imposes obligations that are either inconsistent with contemporary law or favour one side in hotly contested debates.
New data reveals that the UN Security Council has consistently imposed these obligations on parties to non-international armed conflicts. These obligations differ in important ways from accepted customary international law. This talk will review an original dataset that for the first time seeks to quantify the Council's imposition of these new obligations.
Professor Fox will argue that in areas where the Council has deviated from existing agreed norms, its practice should be viewed as evidence of customary international law. A failure to account for Council practice -- which is quite different from state practice -- would consign the work of the central international body addressing NIACs to a legal black hole.
What should be the normative consequences of these patterns in Council activity? In particular, can Council resolutions serve as evidence of customary law?
The Speaker
Gregory H. Fox is a Professor of Law at Wayne State University School of Law, where he is the Director of the Program for International Legal Studies. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law at Cambridge University, a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Public International Law and Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School.
Professor Fox’s current research applies quantitative methods to a variety of international law questions. The first product of this research is an article serving as the basis for this talk: The Contributions of United Nations Security Council Resolutions to the Law of Non-International Armed Conflict (American University Law Review 2018).
Professor Fox has written widely on international law and the promotion of democracy, the international governance of territory, the law of occupation and the United States foreign relations law. Among his publications are Humanitarian Occupation (Cambridge 2008), Democratic Governance and International Law (Cambridge 2000) (with Brad Roth), Transformative Occupation and Creeping Unilateralism (IRRC 2012) and The Occupation of Iraq (Georgetown International Law Journal 2005). His most recent book is a volume edited with his colleagues Brad Roth and Paul Dubinsky, entitled Supreme Law of the Land? Debating the Contemporary Effects of Treaties within the United States Legal System (Cambridge 2017).
The Chair
Chris joined The LSE Department of Law as a Fellow in 2018. Chris' research interests lie in the field of public international law, with a particular focus on the legal regulation of armed conflict. His PhD thesis examined the right of self-defence in international law and the customary requirement that the exercise of defensive force must be necessary and proportionate. He was awarded the University College London (UCL) Faculty of Laws Research Scholarship to conduct this research.
Chris was previously a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at UCL. He holds a PhD and a LLM in International Law from UCL, as well as a LLB in Law and European Law from the University of Nottingham. He has been a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School and Leiden Law School, and was Academic Editor of the UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. Prior to joining UCL, Chris practised as a banking and finance solicitor for Linklaters and Latham & Watkins.
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