Pick Our Brains - with Andres Caceres Solari

The Pick our Brains sessions of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights are for both PhD students and more senior members of our Centre and members of other research centres and universities. These sessions are intended as a mode of intellectual stimulation and exchange, or to potentially promote collaborations within/outside the Centre. The sessions are also designed as an opportunity to get feedback on ongoing/upcoming research, showcase recent research and events at which you presented, as well as to enable an exchange of scholarly ideas. Each session contains a short presentation and a lively debate. A small lunch is provided as well. 

These sessions will take place physically and online. The Teams link for the online sessions will be distributed later.  

On 13 November our speaker is Andrés Caceres Solari (Maastricht University). The title of the presentation is No room for human rights in Gaza and Ukraine, how the law legitimizes urban devastation.

This is the abstract:
International human rights law (IHRL) guarantees the human rights of civilians during armed conflict, despite the primacy of international humanitarian law (IHL) as lex specialis. Although collateral damage inflicting casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure is acceptable when conducting strikes, the rights to life, a home, and health (among others) are still to be respected in the conduct of war. Despite this legal framework and expectation, armed conflicts of the 21st century have shown that civilian deaths and the rate of destruction of cities have exponentially increased in comparison to earlier conflicts. In Ukraine about 13% of urban housing has been destroyed, and in Gaza this figure reaches close to 90%. Parallelly, the public and private health systems in both places are reportedly under crisis. Both of these conflicts have a large, if not unique, nature of urban warfare, thus questioning the ability of IHRL to protect the rights of those it intends to protect while being applicable alongside IHL. This research explores how the drafting, international legal interpretation, and state practice have made IHRL impractical in application alongside IHL in modern urban warfare.