The Extraterritorial Duty to Prevent Genocide at the Time of the Aggression against Ukraine: Open Questions 15 Years after the Bosnia v Serbia Case

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 14:15-15:45, Via Zoom

The event was recorded and is available on YouTube,  as well as streamed live on Facebook 

Abstract

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.

Dr. Marco Longobardo is a Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Westminster, where he teaches public international law, international human rights law, international criminal law, and other related subjects. He has undertaken his doctoral studies at the Sapienza University of Rome and previously lectured at the University of Messina and in the context of international humanitarian law courses for the personnel of the Italian armed forces. He has published extensively on public international law issues and he is the author of The Use of Armed Force in Occupied Territory (Cambridge University Press 2018). For his monograph, Marco was awarded the 2021 Paul Reuter Prize, administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. His scholarship has been cited in official documents by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the UN International Law Commission’s Special Rapporteur on the Protection of the Environment in relation to Armed Conflicts,  and states before international courts. Marco is on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies and of the International Community Law Review. He works as consultant for governmental and non-governmental organisations.