Expert Roundtable:

The Role of International Law in the Ukraine-Russia Conflict

Event Description

PILPG held an expert roundtable on the role of international law in the Ukraine/Russia conflict on March 4 from 12 pm ET to 1 pm ET.

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been rising since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and culminated last in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of a war in Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. Since the signing of the Minsk Accords in 2015, the conflict had turned into a frozen conflict.

Over the past couple of months, tensions in the Eastern part of Ukraine have been rising again. Russia has massed up to 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, causing fears all over the world of a major invasion in Ukraine's mainland. On February 21, 2022, Russia's President Vladimir Putin formally recognized both breakaway regions of Ukraine and order a "peacekeeping" operation, sending its troops into Ukraine. This move has led to an outburst among the international community, calling it an infringement of Ukraine's territorial integrity and international sovereignty.

During this event, PILPG experts—Dr. Yvonne Dutton, Dr. Margaret deGuzman, Ambassador Stephen Rapp, and Professor Jennifer Trahan—discussed the recent developments between Russia and Ukraine, the role of international law in this situation, and why it is still important to talk about concepts such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, the crime of aggression, and the use of force. The event was moderated by PILPG Managing Director Professor Milena Sterio.

This event is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.

Event Recording

Speakers

**Dr. Yvonne Dutton**
Professor Yvonne Dutton is a Senior Legal Advisor at PILPG. She is a Professor of Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law teaching evidence, criminal law, criminal procedure, international criminal law, international law, and comparative law. Professor Dutton has recently been involved with providing technical assistance with the development of framework laws on transitional justice and the harmonization of Ukrainian domestic law with international humanitarian law and the drafting of a legal charter for the Ukrainian peacebuilding/documentation center.
Professor Dutton graduated from Columbia Law School, where she served on the Columbia Law Review and was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar (all years). After graduation, Professor Dutton clerked for the Honorable William C. Conner, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. Professor Dutton has practiced law as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where she tried narcotics trafficking and organized crime cases. She also practiced as a civil litigator in law firms in New York and California.
Professor Dutton’s research interests include international criminal law, international human rights law, and maritime piracy. Broadly speaking, her scholarship examines questions about international cooperation and the role and effectiveness of international institutions in deterring and holding accountable those who commit crimes of international concern. In May 2013, her book entitled Rules, Politics, and the International Criminal Court: Committing to the Court was published by Routledge.

**Dr. Margaret deGuzman**
Margaret M. deGuzman is a Senior Legal Advisor at PILPG. She was recently appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to the roster of Judges of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. She is a Senior James E. Beasley Professor of Law at Temple Law School and Co-Director of Temple’s Institute for International Law and Public Policy. She specializes in criminal law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and transitional justice. She also teaches a course on mindful lawyering. Her scholarship examines the role of international criminal law in the global legal order, with a particular focus on the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Professor deGuzman’s publications include Shocking the Conscience of Humanity: Gravity and the Legitimacy of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press 2020), The Elgar Companion to the International Criminal Court (with Valerie Oosterveld eds., Edward Elgar Publishing 2020), and Arcs of Global Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas (with Diane Marie Amann eds., Oxford University Press 2018). Her work has appeared in numerous other books and journals, including the Journal of Criminal Law and Philosophy, Virginia Journal of International Law, and Yale Journal of International Law. Professor deGuzman serves as a consultant with Global Rights Compliance, and on the editorial board of the African Journal of International Criminal Justice.
Before joining the Temple Law faculty, Professor deGuzman clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced law in San Francisco, specializing in criminal defense. She served as a legal advisor to the Senegal delegation at the Rome Conference on the ICC and as a law clerk in the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Darou Ndiar, Senegal.

**Ambassador Stephen Rapp**
Ambassador Stephen Rapp is a Senior Peace Fellow at PILPG. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow of Practice with the Blavatnik School’s Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict’s Programme on International Peace and Security. He also currently serves as Distinguished Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Prevention of Genocide, and as Chair of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has collected and analysed more than 750,000 pages of documentation from Syria and Iraq to prepare cases for future prosecution.
From 2009 to 2015, he was Ambassador-at-Large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the US State Department. During his tenure, he travelled more than 1.5 million miles to 87 countries to engage with victims, civil society organisations, investigators and prosecutors, and the leaders of governments and international bodies to further efforts to bring the perpetrators of mass atrocities to justice.
Ambassador Rapp was the Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2009, where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. From 2001 to 2007, he served as Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he headed the trial team that achieved the first convictions in history of leaders of the mass media for the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide.
Before becoming an international prosecutor, he was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa from 1993 to 2001.
He received a BA degree from Harvard, a JD degree from Drake, and several honorary degrees from US universities in recognition of his work for international criminal justice.

**Professor Jennifer Trahan**
Jennifer Trahan is Clinical Professor at NYU's Center for Global Affairs where she directs the Concentration in International Law and Human Rights and teaches: International Law; Human Rights in Theory & Practice; International Justice; Transitional Justice; U.S. Use of Force & the “Global War on Terror”; and leads a field intensive to The Hague, Bosnia and Serbia, and one to Rwanda. She has published scores of law review articles and book chapters including on the International Criminal Court’s crime of aggression. Her book, “Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes” (Cambridge University Press 2020) was awarded the “2020 ABILA Book of the Year Award” by
the American Branch of the International Law Association. She has additionally authored: “Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: A Digest of the Case Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda” (HRW 2010) and “Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: A Topical
Digest of the Case Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” (HRW 2006). She serves as one of the US representatives to the Use of Force Committee of the International Law Association and holds various positions with the American Branch of the International Law
Association, including as co-Chair of their Committee on the International Criminal Court. She additionally served as an amicus curiae to the International Criminal Court on the appeal of the situation regarding Afghanistan and served on the Council of Advisers on the Application of the Rome Statute to Cyberwarfare. Most recently she is pleased to have joined the PILPG team in their amicus brief on
the Ongwen appeal, and has become Convenor of the Global Institute for the Prevention of Aggression.

MODERATOR

Milena Sterio, the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Managing Director at PILPG is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. Sterio is one of six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In the spring of 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to the province of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. Sterio has also assisted piracy prosecutions in Mauritius, Kenya and the Seychelles Islands. Sterio is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.