Guest speaker: Professor Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne, University of Bristol
In its 2024 Challenges report, the International Committee of the Red Cross explores the latest challenges to international humanitarian law in contemporary conflicts. Alongside the obvious concerns with deliberate non-compliance and carelessness in targeting decisions, it also noted ‘a more corrosive tendency at work diminishing IHL’s ability to save lives': the growing phenomenon of 'expedient interpretations of IHL – often proposed at the height of armed conflict in order to preserve states’ leeway to kill and detain – [that] have compounded to undermine its protective force.' This phenomenon not only undermines any potential to see the law as a normative system, it goes further and entrenches the legitimising function of the law. In this article, I explore this with reference to the ongoing assault on Gaza and the way in which previous interpretative positions by certain States have undermined the law's restraining role and widened the margin of appreciation within which the Israeli government can make claims to legality.
Speaker biography:
Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne is Professor of Public International Law at the University of Bristol. Previously, he held positions at the John W Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC, and the Universities of Oxford and Reading.
Professor Hill-Cawthorne's research interests cut across a number of topics within public international law, with recent work focusing on international dispute settlement, international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law. He was awarded a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law for the international impact of his research.
Professor Hill-Cawthorne's monograph, Detention in Non-International Armed Conflict, which was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, was awarded the American Society of International Law's 2016 Francis Lieber Prize for best book in the field of international law and armed conflict as well as the 11th Paul Reuter Prize (administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross). It was also shortlisted for the SLS Peter Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. His scholarship has been cited by, amongst others, the UK Court of Appeal and UK Supreme Court.
Professor Hill-Cawthorne works with policymakers and practitioners on various issues in international law and he has acted as advisor to, inter alia, United Nations Special Rapporteurs, the International Bar Association, the European Parliament, and the UK Ministry of Defence. He frequently delivers lectures to government and military lawyers, and he assists counsel in cases raising public law and public international law issues before UK courts and before international tribunals.