Entitled "Battleground Metropolis: Urban Warfare and International Humanitarian Law," the joint conference on March 2, 2018 sought to shed light on current and future challenges for the protection of civilians in Syria and other areas wracked by civil war.
The conference began with a welcome address from musician, actor and current Canadian Red Cross ambassador Tom Jackson, in which he urged audience members to seek meaning in life through activism and volunteerism.
"If some day you're not feeling up to par, I urge you to consciously take that moment as a gift and go and do something for somebody. It works every time," said Jackson.
Next, Canadian Red Cross legal adviser Jonathan Somer opened with an overview of the history of international humanitarian law , a body of law alternately characterized as the "law of war" or the "law of armed conflict."
Referencing a quote by Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, a Polish-British lawyer and a judge at the International Court of Justice, Somer said, "if international law is the vanishing point of law, international humanitarian law or the law of war is the vanishing point of international law."
Following Somer's introduction to this complex area of law, the five panelists took turns discussing the present and future challenges for securing respect for the rules of international humanitarian law in the context of modern urban warfare, with a particular focus on the ongoing conflict in Syria.
The in-person panel included UAlberta Law professor and international law expert Dr. Joanna Harrington, as well as Dr. Siobhan Byrne, UAlberta political science professor and director of the Certificate in Peace and Post-Conflict Studies. Andrew Carswell, Senior Delegate to Canada for the ICRC, and Prof. Christopher Penny, associate professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, also joined the panel via videoconferencing from Ottawa.
Much of the discussion focused on the ongoing violence in Eastern Ghouta, the fertile region east of the capital Damascus that since 2017 has been devastated by conflicts between rebel groups and has been the focus of recent Red Cross and Red Crescent humanitarian efforts, despite ongoing air strikes by the Syrian government and its Russian allies.
Harrington contends that even with the practical challenges inherent in investigating allegations of humanitarian and human rights violations in the region, such work is absolutely vital in laying the groundwork for future peace in the country.
"The UNHRC and General Assembly independent, impartial, international commissions on Syria have been and are in the process of collecting evidence for future tribunals. In addition, Amnesty International has collected evidence on the use of torture in Syria. Even if there is no possibility of prosecutions in Syria itself, there is always the possibility of war crimes prosecutions in other countries," said Harrington, noting the important supporting role Canada and others have played in prosecuting perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in the decade that followed.
"Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other," she added.
Byrne's perspective on the conflict in Syria - and on modern urban warfare generally - stems from her research on post-conflict reconstruction as well as her experience living in East Jerusalem and conducting research in the Israeli-occupied areas of the Palestinian Territories.
Byrne expressed concern that the UN's credibility has suffered as a result of the Syrian conflict in much the same way as it did in the aftermath of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War. She also urged that practitioners of international humanitarian law need to redouble their efforts to secure protections for those most vulnerable.
Any future peace mapping in Syria, she contends, must involve all parties, including the various rebel groups (which number in the thousands across the country), other affected sections of the population such as women, and international stakeholders, which include Russia, Turkey, Iran and the United States. She further added that IHL practitioners are perhaps the last line of defence against the "normalization" of conflicts such as that in Eastern Ghouta and other parts of Syria.
"It's remarkable how normal war can become when you live in a place where it becomes a habit, and this should trouble us greatly," she said. territories.
Photo: Canadian Red Cross aid workers on the ground in Syria in May 2016 (Photo credit: Canadian Red Cross)