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130 days and counting: A responsibility to end the blockade of the Lachin Corridor

Severe shortages in food and medical supplies are increasingly imposing great hardship on Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 ethnic Armenian residents, with provisions depleting quickly and no alleviation anticipated so far. The question that arises is whether a responsibility to end the (current form of) protests and hence alleviate the situation may be uncovered. The Lachin Corridor – the sole land route connecting the Nagorno-Karabakh region to Armenia and the outside world – has been inaccessible to all civilian and commercial traffic for more than four months now, after having been blockaded by Azerbaijani protesters, allegedly backed by the state’s government. Since 12 December 2022, several dozen Azerbaijani protesters, claiming to be concerned with mining activities in the region, have set up tents along the road and have kept the corridor blocked around the clock, with serious humanitarian consequences for the local population (see here and here). Indeed, the protesters’ blockade has impaired and continues to impair access to vital food sources, medical supplies, and services indispensable for survival of the ethnic Armenian residents…

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There wasn’t before, and now there even more definitely isn’t, any legal barrier to providing cross-border humanitarian assistance in northwest Syria

For three long days following last week’s earthquake in Southern Türkiye, thousands of people in northwest Syria lay trapped under rubble, with no help from the UN. The road through Türkiye to the border crossing between southern Türkiye and northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, was damaged. Although, to quote the International Crisis Group’s Syria Analyst Dareen Khalifa,…

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Opening an ICRC Delegation for Cyberspace

With humanitarian organizations becoming more active in and reliant upon new technologies and the digital domain, they have evolved from simple bystanders to full-fledged stakeholders in cyberspace. They also become vulnerable to adverse cyberoperations that could impact their capacity to protect and assist people affected by violence or armed conflict whilst having…

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