[Transsystemic Law] The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation

(This event was organised by MEI’s Transsystemic Law Research Cluster, as part of its quarterly public talks series.)

Abstract

As Israel’s control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory passes its fiftieth anniversary, the speaker offered a critical perspective on the international law of occupation. Advocating a normative and functional approach to occupation and to the question of when it exists, he analyzed the application of humanitarian and human rights law, pointing to the risk of using the law of occupation in its current version to legitimize new variations of conquest and colonialism. The speaker pointed to the need for reconsidering the law of occupation in light of changing forms of control, such as those evident in Gaza. Although the Israeli occupation is a main focal point of the presentation, the speaker also broadened his scope and touch upon at other cases, such as Iraq, Northern Cyprus, and Western Sahara, highlighting the role that international law plays in all of these cases.

About the Speakers
Professor Aeyal Gross
Faculty of Law
Tel-Aviv University

Professor Aeyal Gross is a member of the Faculty in Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law where he teaches International Law and Constitutional Law. He is also a Visiting Professor of Law at SOAS, University of London. He holds an LL.B. from Tel Aviv University (1990) and an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School (1996). In 1998 he was awarded the Diploma in Human Rights from the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, in Florence.

Professor Gross serves as a member of the Board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. He is a founding member of TAU’s LGBT & Queer Studies Forum. He also writes often to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. Prof. Gross also served as a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London, as a Visiting Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa, and as a Joseph Flom Global Health and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard Law School. Additionally he taught as a visitor in Columbia University and the University of Toronto and in the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence. In 2017 he was a Fernard Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence.

He is the author of numerous articles, including After the Falls: International Law between Postmodernity and Anti-Modernity (in Helene Ruiz-Fabri, Emanuelle Jouannet & J.M. Sorel, eds., Regards D’Une Generation Sur Le Droit International, Editions Pedone, 2008), Gender Outlaws Before the Law: The Courts of the Borderlands (Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, 2009),  Post/Colonial Queer Globalization and Human Rights: Images of LGBT Rights, (Jindal Global Law Review,   2013), Litigating the Right to Health: What Can We Learn from a Comparative Law and Health Care Systems Approach (Health and Human Rights, 2015),  “We Didn’t Want to Hear the Word Calories”: Rethinking Food Security, Food Power,  Food Sovereignty – Lessons from the Gaza Closure (With Tamar Feldman, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2015), and “Homogloblism: The Emregence of Global Gay Governance” (in Dianne Otto, ed., Queering International Law, Routledge 2017). He is the co-editor, with Colleen Flood, of The Right To Health At The Public/Private Divide: A Global Comparative Study (Cambridge University Press,  2014), which includes his article The Right to Health in Israel Between Solidarity and Neo-liberalism, and the author of The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Event Details

MEI Conference Room, Level 6
Block B, 29 Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Singapore 119620

Related Events