Fidei Defensor

Reverend Dr. Andrew Teal is fellow, chaplain, and full member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University. The following is an edited summary of his keynote address delivered at the ICLRS 29th Annual International Law and Religion Symposium, 4 October 2022.

Our Responsibility to Each Other

Years ago, before flying to Utah for an extended visit, I received a message asking me to call on my now-departed, dear friend Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a very significant scholar of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He gave me a command—quite literally a Metropolitan command—and his blessing to enable me to strive to fulfil it: “Go,” he said. “Go and really listen; go and understand; go to love and to bring Love.”

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The War and Religion in Ukraine: The Role of NGOs in Evidence Collection for Future International Trials

Michelle Coleman is a lecturer in law at Swansea University.

The war in Ukraine is possibly the most documented war in history. Governments, news organizations, the International Criminal Court, NGOs, and individuals are continually monitoring and documenting events as they take place in real time. Some of this collection and preservation of information is with an eye toward determining whether war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.

In March 2022 I wrote for this blog about the importance of information collection before deciding whether international criminal law would be pertinent to the war in Ukraine. I argued that the need for prosecutions and trials can only be determined following a thorough investigation. Some time must pass while a conflict is ongoing in order to gain perspective, gather evidence, and sort through what might be a war crime or crime against humanity and what might just be an unfortunate, but legal, consequence of war. Now, nearly a year later, we can consider the importance of this information gathering and how it may be used within the context of international criminal law.

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The Fight for Rights of Holocaust Survivors—Transforming a Breach of Basic International Humanitarian Law Rights into Individual Compensations Programs

Avraham Weber is an adjunct lecturer at Philipps–University Marburg and a visiting scholar at CUNY Brooklyn College. The post is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement.

Legalization of the Term Genocide and Individual Claims of Holocaust Survivors

December 1946 brought the United Nations Assembly General to vote on a unanimous resolution, embedding for the first time in history the legal term genocide. Not long after, in December 1948, the UN would adopt the treaty for prevention of genocide. Further important developments in international humanitarian law soon followed, mainly in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted a day later, also in December 1948. This wave of declarations, and the move to create an open, individual rights–based discussion within international law, paved the way for continued recognition of individuals as the subject of international law. This is demonstrated in the First Protocol of the Geneva IV Convention and, of course, later in the Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court.

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