15 August 2014

SHARES News Items Overview: 16 July 2014-15 August 2014

This is our News Items Overview of 16 July 2014-15 August 2014, a summary of recent news relating to shared responsibility.

• The District Court of The Hague held that the state of the Netherlands is responsible regarding the death of more than 300 men, who were killed after their eviction from a compound near Srebrenica where Dutch peacekeepers of UNPROFOR (Dutchbat) were posted in 1995. The case against the NL was brought by the relatives of ten victims and the association ‘Mothers of Srebrenica’.
• Lisa Clarke’s book Public-Private Partnerships and Responsibility under International Law: A Global Health Perspective has recently been published at Routledge.
• Valerie Amos, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, warned that ‘all parties to the conflict [in Syria] must uphold their obligations to protect civilians and comply with the principles of humanitarian law’.
• At a conference in Benin, ministers, senior government officials and UN representatives called on donor countries to fulfil their commitments to the world’s least developed countries. Participants highlighted the principle of shared responsibilities and the need for greater collaboration among governments, the private sector and civil society.
• The European Court of Human Rights found that Poland violated its obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights by cooperating with the United States in the running of so-called ‘CIA black sites’ on Polish territory.
• The UN has designated its highest level emergency for the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, citing the scale and complexity of the situation, which is impacting tens of thousands of people that have been forcefully displaced by the armed group Islamic State (IS). Special Advisors to the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide and on the Responsibility to Protect said that acts undertaken by IS constitute grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, and may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and potentially genocide.
• The UN World Health Organization (WHO) declared the current Ebola outbreak, which is now affecting more than 1 million people in West Africa, an international public health emergency. Between 10 and 11 August, 128 new cases of the Ebola virus disease, as well as 56 deaths, were reported from Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, bringing the total number of cases to 1,975 and deaths to 1,069. Canada announced it is sending up to a thousand doses of an experimental Ebola vaccine to be distributed through the WHO in West Africa.