EJIL Analysis

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The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill and the Irish Sea: risks of reciprocal application to the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict

September 18, 2020

The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill (as introduced) does not apply to legacy cases from the Northern Ireland conflict. Yet against the backdrop of similar cries of ‘witch hunt’ its introduction in 18 March 2020 was concurrent and explicitly linked to a Written Ministerial Statement on the same day. Through this the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland announced the unilateral-abandonment by the UK of the Stormont House Agreement (SHA) to, in his words, ’ensure equal treatment of Northern Ireland veterans and those who served overseas’.  This constituted a seismic U-turn, legally and politically. The SHA had been painstakingly negotiated by British and Irish governments and the five parties in the NI Executive. It proposed new institutions to deal with unresolved conflict-related deaths. This included an Historical Investigations Unit (HIU), an independent body with full police-type powers to conduct Article 2 ECHR compliant investigations, and an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR), a truth-recovery body with a case-by-case focus, to be established with international immunities. The SHA…

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Occupational Hazards of Soldiers – A Critique of Section 3 of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21

September 17, 2020

Being a soldier is not for the faint-hearted. There is no shortage of written and audio-visual accounts of the horrors of war and soldiers’ physical and psychological suffering. It becomes worse when the enemy is nowhere to be seen and yet everywhere, the environment is littered with improvised explosive devices, landmines and booby-traps, and there is no safe…

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The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-2021: A Pragmatic Response to Over-Zealous Claims Against the Military or a Vehicle for Impunity? Introduction to the Symposium on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

September 17, 2020

The United Kingdom (UK) Government has introduced the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill to regulate legal proceedings stemming from operations of the UK armed forces outside of the British Islands. The Bill received its first reading in March 2020 and it is anticipated that the second reading will take place in September or October this…

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Book Symposium: Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals: Wrap-Up

September 16, 2020

We hope that readers have enjoyed our discussion of Daniel Peat’s Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals. Many thanks to Daniel, Richard, Yvonne, and Antonios for participating. Congratulations are also due to Daniel for winning the 2020 ESIL Book Prize last week! Readers might also be…

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Book Symposium: Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals: A Response

September 15, 2020

In this symposium, Richard, Yvonne, and Antonios have all kindly taken the time to engage with some of the issues raised in Comparative Reasoning and I would like to take this chance to respond to some of their points. In the interests of space, I’ll limit myself to two issues: first, I will clarify some of my arguments…

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