About the author(s):
Laura Íñigo Álvarez is an Assistant Professor in International Law at NOVA School of Law in Lisbon. She is also the co-coordinator of the recently created NOVA War and Law Lab and the scientific coordinator of the NOVA Centre on Business, Human Rights and the Environment. Her main research interests are international human rights law, international humanitarian law and armed non-state actors, international criminal law, and business and human rights.
On 29 September 2020, Alma – the Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law will hold the online launch of the book Towards a Regime of Responsibility of Armed Groups in International Law (Intersentia 2020). The event will be introduced by Ido Rosenzweig, Alma’s Chairman and Director of research at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions, and will be followed by the presentations of Dr. Laura Íñigo Álvarez, author of the book, Dr. Katharine Fortin, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, Ezequiel Heffes, Thematic Legal Adviser at Geneva Call, and Prof. Dr. Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
The book explores the question of whether armed groups could be held internationally responsible as a collectivity and which methodology could be applied to answer this question. The issue of holding armed groups internationally responsible was already pointed out by the first version of the Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts in 1997 in former article 14 which acknowledged the possibility of attributing the conduct of an organ of an insurrectional movement to that movement, although this article was later deleted in the final version. In addition, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in its study on Customary International Humanitarian Law also mentions that armed groups ‘incur responsibility for acts committed by persons forming part of such groups’. The book takes these premises as a starting point in order to further elaborate on a possible framework of international responsibility for armed groups. Among other elements, the book looks at how acts of formal or de facto members of an armed group can be attributed to the group itself or whether the armed group is under an obligation to provide reparations to victims.
In the upcoming weeks, this blog will host a mini-symposium with the panellists taking part in the book launch.
The event will take place via zoom at 19:00 CEST (13:00 EST, 20:00 Israel Time). More information and the registration link can be found here.