The purpose of this symposium is to explore the interplay between international law, policy and concrete decisions in the field of security.

International law influences (or should influence) policies as well as concrete decisions by states -- from the clear rule that the exercise of self-defence should be reported to the Security Council to broader principles like the principle of non-intervention. There are also values (or implicit policies) in the concept of law itself, for instance that like cases should be treated alike:

If one state interprets a rule in a novel way or proposes a new rule, any other state may invoke that very rule under the same interpretation, and this forces governments to think beyond the particular situation at hand.

Conversely, political decisions influence the interpretation and application of international law. At each decision point, more than one interpretation of the applicable rule, principle or concept may seem theoretically plausible (though not necessarily equally appealing), and a choice has to be made by the applier. That choice, in its turn, contributes to the development of international law, in the form of state practice and opinio justice (if articulated) or as subsequent treaty practice. This is true not only for concrete decisions, where the abstract law should be interpreted and applied to an often-foggy situation on the ground, but also in the tranquil situation of codification, where lawyers try to make sense of the various sources of international law, including state practice.

When national security or other vital interests are at risk, an existential element is added to the dialectic relation between law and politics. Considerations of legality may appear to be less important than the values at stake, and it may be tempting to violate the law as previously understood. But the result may also be an effort to forge a new conception of the law which fits with the situation at hand. For instance, perhaps an attack by a foreign non-state armed group may be considered an armed attack under Article 51 of the Charter?

Changes in the law may be the result of a reassessment of established balances between contradicting values, principles and rules. For instance, what about the need to respect sovereign immunity of a foreign leader when the need to sanction the supreme crime of aggression seems acute? Threats against security may also elicit discussions about the values that security is supposed to protect --- democracy, human rights etc. To what extent can one limit the exercise of human rights in order to protect the people that should benefit from that right?

Nilufer spoke at the Panel “The armchair and the situation room: From concrete decisions to abstract codification and back.”

More about the event at the link: https://esil-sedi.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/SCILJ-Symposium-ThemeProgramme-rev-3.pdf