Masoud Zamani delivered a presentation to the Security Group titled 'Detention of Civilians in International Armed Conflicts: A decade of confusion' on Thursday 23rd Jan.
Masoud Zamani drew academics, PhD students and post-graduates to his talk. The presentation considered the definitions of detention without trial and internment in armed conflict, and how the advent of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ threw the entirety international humanitarian law into disarray.
Masoud argued that the Bush administration’s idiosyncratic concept of ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ exploited the US executives perceived gaps in the international humanitarian law regime. The decade of confusion concerned the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations since September 11th 2001.
Masoud contextualized certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions and argued that the Fourth Geneva Convention, in particular, holds more currency than ever in formulating a detention regime for individual protected persons, and that no gap exists in the regime of international humanitarian law for the purposes of leaving persons suspected of having violated the laws of international armed conflicts outside its protection.
Masoud’s presentation also, perhaps most intriguingly, introduced the ‘Special Pig Theory’. Perhaps in years to come this will become a key concept in international law, all credit to Mr Zamani.
This was the second Security Group of 2014 and set the bar high for the next meeting.
Posted on Thursday 6th February 2014