Strengthening International Humanitarian Legal Protections for Marginalized Groups
Accounting for Children, Women, LGBTQ+ Persons, and Persons with Disabilities
How can international humanitarian legal protections better protect members of historically marginalized groups? Law and policy experts will discuss opportunities and challenges in this space.
International humanitarian law (IHL) seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by protecting persons who are not or are no longer participating in the hostilities. However, IHL has been slow to develop effective measures that address the outsize harms experienced by certain marginalized groups, including children, women, and persons with disabilities. Efforts to strengthen the protection of civilians during armed conflict (and other situations of risk) were intensified following failures of protection in Rwanda and Bosnia and served as the impetus for action by the international community through the United Nations (UN) system. Successive resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council on the protection of civilians generally and in relation to specific groups, including women and children, helped to highlight protection concerns. Only in 2019 did the UN Security Council acknowledge the enhanced risk that persons with disabilities experience during armed conflict, in the face of growing evidence of widespread human rights violations against them. This development spurred greater attention to the protection of persons with disabilities during armed conflict, as evidenced by the work of HPOD, the International Review of the Red Cross, and the focused reporting on the topic by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This panel of IHL experts and practitioners will take stock of recent developments that seek to enhance the protection of at-risk populations under IHL, better account for the harms experienced by otherwise “invisible” groups and outline strategies for building on these advances.
Real-time captioning (CART) will be provided.
Welcoming Remarks:
Professor Michael Ashley Stein, Executive Director, Harvard Law School Project on Disability
Moderator & Panel Framing:
Janet E. Lord, Senior Associate, Harvard Law School Project on Disability & Senior Legal Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Persons with Disabilities
Panelists:
Jillian Rafferty, Managing Editor, International Review of the Red Cross
Dustin A. Lewis, Research Director for the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict
Benyam Dawit Mezmur, Member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
William Pons, Researcher, Harvard Law School Project on Disability & Senior Legal Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Persons with Disabilities
Jocelyn Kelly, Director for Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s (HHI) Gender, Rights and Resilience (GR2) program
Audience Q&A
Related Readings:
Janet Lord, Rosemary Kayess, William Pons and Michael Ashley Stein, The U.N. Process for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty Has Finally Started. Will It Account for Persons with Disabilities? Just Security (May 26, 2023)
William I. Pons, Janet E. Lord, and Michael Ashley Stein, Addressing the accountability void: War crimes against persons with disabilities, 922 Int’l Rev. Red Cross (2022)
Janet E. Lord, Accounting for disability in international humanitarian law, 922 Int’l Rev. Red Cross (2022)
William I. Pons, Janet E. Lord, & Michael Ashley Stein, Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity, 116 Am. J. Int’l L. 58 (2022)
Jocelyn T. D. Kelly, Emily Ausubel, Emma Kenny, Meredith Blake, Christine Heckman, Sonia Rastogi, & Vandana Sharma, Measuring gender-based violence risk mitigation in humanitarian settings: results from a comprehensive desk review and systematic mapping, BMJ Open 11:e050887 (2021)
Benyam Dawit Mezmur, Taking measures without taking measurements?: An insider’s views on monitoring the implementation of the African Children’s Charter in the context of armed conflict, 911 Int’l Rev. Red Cross 623 (2019)
Naz K. Modirzadeh & Dustin A. Lewis, Humanitarian Values in a Counterterrorism Era, 103 Int’l Rev. Red Cross 403 (2021)
International Committee of the Red Cross, Gendered impacts of armed conflicts and implications for the application of IHL (2022)
International Committee of the Red Cross, Childhood in Rubble: The Humanitarian Consequences of Urban Warfare for Children (2023)
Event Co-Sponsors:
Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict
Harvard Law School Project on Disability
Harvard Law School Human Rights Program