 Why does it matter whether a situation is an armed conflict or not? International humanitarian law, the laws of war apply only to an armed conflict. They provide plenty of rules of protection, but we have also to admit that they at least tolerate that you deliberately kill people. Just one word before we start, I would like to give the floor to our director, the director of international law and policy at ICRC. I think I'm the first director of law in the ICRC's history to have the word policy added as well. And I think that really shows the desire of the ICRC where we've always done policy, really more deeply engage in the political and engagement in the sense of bringing forward the humanitarian imperative that we find in IHL that we are so close to and engage with and putting it through a policy perspective. Staying away from politics, staying away from some of the things that people often associate with policy, but making sure our voice on critical humanitarian issues is loudly heard. Tonight is a really good example of how we take law and policy and the application of a range of principles and reflect on them. Obviously armed conflict today involves implications that go way beyond traditional borders and in that sense it raises formidable questions about the material, the geographical scope and issues such as the temporal applicability of IHL. And I think we're very fortunate to have such experts on a panel to help us reflect, to think, to maybe ask more questions, but point us in some diverse directions of being able to find more clarity on this at times seemingly complex and increasing complex area. So thank you for the opportunity to address you tonight. I'll pass it back to Vincent. Let me add a few words as editor-in-chief of the review. We are having this panel this evening on the scope of the law in armed conflict. This is the same title as our upcoming issue of the review. And tonight we'll discuss with the panelists among which we have two authors who contributed to this issue of the journal. On this topic, the scope of the law in armed conflict. So the issue is not yet in print and I wait for this moment because I always appreciate a lot when our issues come out, but it's not a virtual launch because we have the authors and we have also articles ready. And they are on Cambridge University Press website and on the IHRC website. So most of the articles are already online. So let me say briefly just a few words about why we decided to address this topic which sounds quite dry, scope of application of the law. But it actually hides lots of very urgent issues. We chose to address this topic because looking at policy debates and legal debates, we see that some questions are coming up again and again. Is it permissible to target anyone anywhere using armed drones? When does an armed conflict end? Can states apply their own human rights standards when they are involved in armed conflict abroad? These are a series of questions which come back in the media on a daily basis. And they are very simple questions. It's about when does the law apply? To whom does it apply? Who does it protect? Where does it apply? On which territory? These are very simple questions but they require complex answers. And that's what we'll be discussing tonight. The complex answers to these very basic questions in the law. For me working on this issue, the most pressing question was why? Why do we need the law? And that's the question we need to address when we want to interpret the law. And I think the answer is quite simple. It's to protect the dignity, the life, the properties of the victims of armed conflict. So we are discussing about very concrete issues which are present today in armed conflicts all over the world. Working on this issue also dealing with the word scope. At first my impression was that the law was defining a kind of narrow space of protection. Around which you have unlimited violence. But possibly it should be the other way around. And we should see the law as establishing the boundaries of violence. And that's the question I've had in mind. So that's the question I would like to ask the panel. And on this I give the floor to Noam. Thank you. We used to think it was much simpler. Some of the questions we're looking at now. We moved on in a way in recent years when we were talking about various issues of international humanitarian law. We've moved on to all of these very specific and specialized issues. And nowadays we talk a lot about particular technologies. And we talk about there's all of these very specific questions also within the conduct of hostilities. But the basic questions of what is an armed conflict? When and where does IHL apply? My own impression was that at least sort of 10, 20 years ago we kind of thought we know the answer to that. Instead of things getting clearer with time, they've gotten more and more complicated. And so now when we discuss these issues we're stuck with questions over the classification of armed conflict and what is an armed conflict. And some of this is because of the so-called war on terror. But it's not only that. It's not only the issue of drones and so on. It's actually in a way looking at some of the things that have come up from these types of operations. It's made us realize that things that we were taking for granted earlier are actually not that simple. And I think we might see some examples of that in the discussion. And so there have been more and more efforts in recent years to try and sort some of it out. They haven't so far been completely successful. We had a project at Chatham House a couple of years ago. El and I were both part of that where we produced a book on the classification of armed conflict. But we didn't solve the problems. I mean, honestly now I think if we were doing it all over again, we'd probably have another five chapters on some of the issues that we're touching upon today where we didn't really even think about too much when we were doing that. And that was just two, three years ago. So the questions keep amounting and piling up before we can manage to solve them. It's not just a question of what is an armed conflict. It's also whether conflicts have clearly determined geographical boundaries. Is the applicability of IHL tied to the location of stillities or not? When does it start? When does it end? We're actually debating some of these. And I think you might find that even on this panel, we have different answers to some of these questions. And we don't necessarily agree. And it's not just the academics and the ICRC and it's among states. You have disagreements over the answers to some of these questions. What the panel this evening is going to try and do is hopefully provide some further thoughts to help us move forward with the debate, at least to understand where the debate is, what it is we need to be considering, what are the implications of some of the different answers that are out there to these questions. And, well, we have quite a wonderful panel, I must say. Probably if I had to pick my favourite people in this field to sit on the panel with, I'd probably be high up there on the list what we've got here. We have simply three excellent speakers, incredibly knowledgeable, thought-provoking, and I'm looking forward to hear what they have to say. I'll briefly introduce all three of them up front and then we won't be sort of breaking up in between and we'll move from one to the other. Professor Marquis Sassouli, to my right, is a professor of international law and director of the Department of International Law and International Organisations at the University of Geneva. He's a commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists. He worked for many years from the mid-80s to the late-90s at the ICRC in headquarters, including as the deputy head of the legal division. He's worked in conflict areas, including the Middle East and the Balkans, and to his great credit, although many people in the world of academia think it's completely bizarre, but usually when academics have a sabbatical, they sort of step back and go somewhere where they can relax and sit and write. Marquis did the opposite. He went to Pakistan and worked with the ICRC, and that just shows the dedication to actually understanding what it is that one writes about. He's also chair of the Board of Geneva Call, an NGO that works with non-state armed actors. Anyway, no longer. Okay. I didn't know that. Professor Sassouli is going to talk about the nature and challenges of classification, who gets to classify, what are the criteria for identifying the existence of an armed conflict, whether it be international or non-international, and some of the challenges with classifying situations that don't neatly fit into our predetermined criteria. We'll then turn to Yelena Page, who is the senior legal advisor at the ICRC's legal division. Within the ICRC, she's responsible for legal and policy issues related to the status and treatment of persons deprived of liberty and important for today to the extraterritorial use of force against non-state armed groups. She's also in charge of a joint initiative being facilitated with the Swiss government, aimed at establishing a new IHL compliance system. From 2002 to 2008, she was head of the ICRC's project on the reaffirmation and development of international humanitarian law, and has written and presented extensively on many topics in the area of IHL human rights and international criminal law. Yelena will be talking about the challenges of IHL applicability and extraterritorial drone strikes against armed groups, questions of international or non-international armed conflict, how do we interpret the criteria such as the required intensity for non-international armed conflict in these contexts, and how does this affect rules on targeting and who can be targeted, where and when. And then finally we'll turn to Marko Milanovic, who is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham School of Law. He's also the secretary general and member of the Executive Board of the European Society of International Law, an associate of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, and the co-editor of IHL Talk, the blog of the European Journal of International Law. If you want to stay on top of what's happening in international law in these areas, just make sure you always go to the IHL Talk website. There's always a lot of good discussion there. He was a law clerk to judge Thomas Borgental at the ICJ in 2006 and 2007, and has been councilor advisor in cases before the ICJ, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Constitution Court of Serbia. Marko, that's Marko with a K, as opposed to Marko with a C, will be talking about the temporal aspects and mainly the end of conflict, and what are the criteria to determine when a conflict ends, and what happens to IHL at that point, is the end of a conflict a mirror image to the start of a conflict in terms of the criteria or not, and does that work equally whether we're talking about international or non-international situations?