Symposia

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GC IV: Internment in Non-Occupied Territory

March 6, 2026

Jelena Pejic

International humanitarian law (IHL) treaties use a range of terms to denote deprivation of liberty, one of which is internment. While there is no legal definition, internment is understood to mean the non-criminal detention of a person based on the serious security threat his or her activity poses to a detaining authority. It is the most common form of deprivation of liberty in armed conflict, especially international. This contribution to the joint EJIL Talk /Just Security/ICRC blog series on the occasion of the online publication of the ICRC’s updated Commentary on the 1949 Fourth Geneva (Civilian) Convention first provides a brief reminder of the concept of internment. It then focuses on a particular interpretive elaboration related to the application of IHL obligations in non-occupied territory, highlighting the issue of internment. It ends with a few final remarks. The Basics of Internment in IAC…

Subsequent practice in the ICRC’s updated Commentary on GC IV

February 27, 2026

Abhimanyu George Jain and Ellen Policinski

Since 2011, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been engaged in a project to revise and update its Commentaries on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols. Updated Commentaries on the first three Geneva Conventions were released in 2016, 2017 and 2020, and the updated Commentary on the…

Reading the Updated Commentary on GCIV in an Imperial Moment

February 20, 2026

Boyd van Dijk

The updated ICRC Commentary of the Fourth Geneva Convention (GCIV) is a monumental, if not timely, achievement. At its core, it provides a set of very useful legal interpretations on an enormous body of rules and provisions, reflecting a gigantic amount of work by an adroit ICRC team, supported by numerous experts from both academia and practice.

Protecting civilians in good faith: A joint symposium on the updated ICRC Commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention

February 17, 2026

Mary Guest

Following five years of research and consultations, the ICRC published a new, updated Commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV) of 1949 in October 2025. GC IV is the cornerstone of protection for civilians in international armed conflict and occupation – protections that remain urgently relevant amid patterns of urban warfare, strikes on essential services, and persistent…

Closing the Last Gap in International Criminal Law: Why a Convention on Crimes Against Humanity Matters

January 16, 2026

Jörg Polakiewicz

This is a post in our Joint Symposium on "Negotiating a Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity" run in partnership with Just Security. The international community stands at a pivotal moment in the evolution of international criminal law. While genocide and war crimes have long been codified in dedicated international treaties, crimes against humanity — arguably among…

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Complementarity (in)action in the UK?

December 7, 2018

Thomas Obel Hansen

Editor's Note: This post is part of our Joint Symposium with Justice in Conflict on Human Rights Watch's Report, Pressure Point: The ICC's Impact on National Justice In response to the 2014 re-opening of an International Criminal Court (ICC) preliminary examination into…

Joint Symposium: Chatham House Report on Proportionality in the Conduct of Hostilities – Some Key Elements

January 28, 2019

Emanuela Gillard

This is the first post in our joint symposium arising out of the publication of the Chatham House report, Proportionality in the Conduct of Hostilities: The Incidental Harm Side of the Assessment. This piece is cross-posted on Just Security. At the end of 2018 the International Law Programme at Chatham House published a…

Introduction to ESIL Symposium on ‘International Human Rights Law in Times of Crisis’

February 23, 2017

Başak Çali and Lorna McGregor

The theme of the 2016 ESIL Annual Conference in Riga was ‘How International Law Works in Times of Crisis’. In line with our practice for the last two annual conferences, the ESIL Interest Group on International Human Rights Law applied the conference theme to International Human Rights Law (IHRL) by hosting an afternoon seminar on ‘The Place…

Introducing The Thin Justice of International Law

June 1, 2015

Steven R. Ratner

I begin with thanks to the editors of the two blogs that have organized this mini-symposium and to the five authors, from ethics and international law, who have agreed to comment on my book. I hope this experiment in interdisciplinary blogging will be the start of something bigger. The project that eventually became The Thin Justice…