SHARES blog
12 December 2012
On 11 December 2012, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that there are more than half a million registered Syrian refugees. That number is climbing by the day, as more refugees flood into neighboring countries. In Turkey, for example, 136,319 refugees are living in 14 government-run camps. From there, many of them try to make it into Greece, the gateway to Europe, only to be returned to Turkey. (more…)
21 November 2012
On 9 November 2012, the European Court of Human Rights rendered its judgment in Alisic and others v Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a high profile case concerning lost savings of citizens in former Yugoslavia. The savings were frozen when the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s also resulted in the splitting up of two former state banks, raising complex issues of liability. (more…)
8 October 2012
On 27 September 2012, the District Court of The Hague handed down this important decision in an ongoing situation regarding three detained witnesses of the International Criminal Court (ICC) who have sought asylum in the Netherlands. The decision raises a number of fundamental issues concerning the relationship between ICC jurisdiction as opposed to the Netherlands jurisdiction, as well as important human rights issues. (more…)
8 October 2012
The negotiations on accession by the EU to the ECHR have recently entered their final stage. Representatives of the EU and of the forty-seven parties to the ECHR (the so-called Group 47+1, which has published the reports of its first and second meeting) are scheduled to meet twice this autumn to agree on a final accession agreement. It is likely that it will largely be based on the draft agreement on EU accession, which was made publicly available last year. Once final agreement has been reached, it is very likely that the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) will be asked for an Opinion on whether the agreement is compatible with the EU Treaties. Should the CJEU give the agreement a green light, the ratification process can begin.
This blog entry asks whether the co-respondent mechanism provided for in the draft agreement leads to a sensible allocation of responsibility between the EU and its Member States for violations of the Convention post-accession. (more…)
25 September 2012
The continuing conflict in Syria has raised many questions of shared responsibility (see, for example, here and here). This blog post will discuss the issue of the provision of weapons and other military equipment to Syria.
In June this year, Human Rights Watch urged governments and companies around the world to stop signing new contracts (and evaluate existing contracts) with arms suppliers that are providing weapons to the Syrian government, such as the Russian firm Rosoboronexport, and suggested that those providing weapons to the Syrian regime could be regarded as being complicit in the crimes committed by the Syrian army. (more…)