 So, what Marcos Assoli dealt with really is the beginning, right? For most of the rules of IHL, when do they start applying? The one issue that I want to talk about is when do they end applying, so the end of the application of IHL. Now that question to sort of do a riff on Noam's opening used to be simple. It used to be an easy question. When did IHL start applying when state A declared war against state B? Well, the law of war started, when did the law of war end applying when they conclude a peace treaty? That was the position 100 years ago, say. That is not the position today. Today the position is complicated, right? It's very complicated, it's very difficult for four at least reasons. The first is that if you look at the modern IHL treaties, they don't give you clear guidance. There are teeny-weeny bits about the end of application of IHL in the treaties, and I'll come back to them mostly, except for one article, I think, they relate to international armed conflict. The second problem is the way that modern IHL has developed. So some people analogize it to a palimpsest, you know? So you have an ancient book, a scroll envelope, and then you scrape it off, and then you write something on top of the existing text. So it's in these layers, in these waves, that IHL has developed. That means there's no original drafter whose intent we can find out, and that original drafter worked every problem out, and you only have to look hard enough and you'll find the answer, right? That does not exist. So that's problem two. Problem three is that the way we have organized modern IHL is fragmented. So we have at least three distinct thresholds of application, international armed conflict, diligent occupation, non-international armed conflict, and we can even sort of do classifications within each subgroup, right? And you will see that even though the paradigm sort of example is international armed conflict, this issue of end of application is one where it's very difficult to draw analogies between different types of armed conflict. So for example, if you look at how the modern law of NIAC, Non-International Conflict, developed, it developed mostly by various smart people doing analogies from time to time. Think most prominently the ICTY appeals chamber in the Tadich case saying, what is prohibited in international armed conflict cannot be prohibited in non-international armed conflict. Rape is a rape, that type of kind of moralist activist thinking. That does not work, as you'll see, when we come to questions of end of application. Finally, perhaps the most complicating factor are really the policy considerations of those who get to decide, or at least as Marco said, have their opinions known about whether IHL did in fact end applying. In other words, do we want IHL to apply, or to stop applying? And if you ask different people, different actors, some of them will have different interests when it comes to this particular question. If you ask, for example, international criminal tribunal, they will be very reluctant to say that, aha, at point X, the conflict stopped. Or the conflict was interrupted and then later resumed. Why would they be reluctant? Because their jurisdiction to try some very bad guys for war crimes is dependent on that issue. And generally they want to get the bad guy. So international criminal tribunals will be very, very pro-stability, pro-long duration of what do we mean by an armed conflict. For instance, one of the classical sort of quotes on when do armed conflicts end and when did IHL start to stop supplying comes precisely from the appeals chamber in Tadich when it said, IHL starts at the initiation of armed conflict and extends beyond the cessation of hostilities until a general conclusion of peace is reached, or in the case of internal conflicts, a peaceful settlement is achieved. That is not correct, I would say. There's certainly no need for armed conflicts to end in a consensual way or with an agreement. You can have an agreement. It's a very nice thing to have an agreement. But as we see, for example, with the whole Ukraine thingy, I'm not doing the whole fromagia thing, sorry. So you can have whatever agreement, but it's not worth the paper it's written on if the fighting continues. So what matters and what should matter for the end of armed conflict is not how the parties put it, but whether in fact objectively they have stopped fighting. But as I said, different people will have different interests on this question. Originally, states saw IHL as a set of constraining rules. So you must not arbitrarily execute people without judicial pronouncement. You must not issue orders that no quarter will be given and so on. So these types of rules. Now, however, some states at least, see IHL as a set of liberating rules that liberate them from greater constraints, say, of human rights. So whereas back in the old days, they wouldn't want to acknowledge the existence of a non-international armed conflict. Now they want to have a non-international armed conflict. So think the United States and the Warrantary. So all of these issues matter, right? They matter for the policy judgment of those whose opinions ultimately have influence. Okay, so much so about why the issue is complicated. Let me now say what I think the basic legal position is. I think that position can be summarized in several sort of relatively simple propositions. The first one is there are some rules, very few rules, that apply all the time, right? So they apply regardless of any armed conflict. That's mostly the case with the overarching obligation to ensure respect for the Geneva Conventions, for example. And specific obligations like to disseminate IHL with your troops or your population. The time actually to do this is in peace, not in war. That's the best time to do this. So these rules apply all the time. Most of the rules of IHL start applying during armed conflict. And remember we have those three distinct threshold. And the general rule should be that unless there's a very good reason of policy, law, whatever, principle, these rules should stop applying when their factual predicate ends. So when the conflict actually ends, or the occupation ends. But, and that's my third proposition, there are in fact many exceptions from this general idea that IHL stops applying when the armed conflict ends. And I'll come to these exceptions. So what we can see really are when it comes to armed conflicts, we can observe certain terminative processes that end them. And we can observe some transformative processes that are also very important with which Marco talked about. So when an internal armed conflict can be internationalized into an international armed conflict. Or vice versa when international armed conflict can be internalized and become a NIAC. So I will not talk about them more, but we can probably talk them during discussion. These also of course matter for end of application purposes. Because when this thing happens, when a NIAC becomes internationalized, one part of IHL stops applying, but a different part of IHL kicks in. Okay, so let me now deal with each of the three main thresholds in turn. Let me start with international armed conflict. There we actually have some guidance in the text that I'll come to. And there also the situation seems to be the clearest. As Marco was saying, the sort of orthodox position is that there either is no intensity threshold for an armed conflict to exist between states, or if there is one, it's a very teeny weeny one. So not Marco's son shooting some unfortunate French person, but something a bit more. Yeah, okay. But because that threshold to initiate an international armed conflict is so low, the threshold for ending it should actually be high. Because what we want to avoid is to have international armed conflict on Monday, no armed conflict on Tuesday, international armed conflict resuming on Wednesday and so on. So we do not want to have a revolving door. What we want is the fighting to end, but with a certain degree of permanence and stability. The question is how do we prove and how do we know that there is stability in the end of the fighting? The thing is you cannot actually know it at the point where the fighting ends. You can only rationalize post hoc, right? A couple of weeks, months, however late, aha, that was the point at which the fighting ended with stability and permanence. It would be nice as a matter of evidence to have some kind of agreement, but you don't need to have an agreement. So for example, what they've been saying is supported, for instance, by the trial chamber of the Gotovina, in the Gotovina case, the trial chamber of the ICT-1. What little we have in terms of textual guidance also goes in favor of this position. So for example, if you look at the third convention, it speaks of the obligation to repatriate prisoners of war at the end of active hostilities. The fourth convention, Article 6-2, says that its application in territories of the parties ends with the general close of military operations. This is different language. We have no idea whether the difference in language was deliberate or it was just a question of drafting. The ICRC, in the Protocol-1 commentary, says actually the general close of military operation can come after the cessation of active hostilities. You can do maneuvers, assemble ammunitions, do all sorts of preparatory work for fighting even after the end of the hostilities. So what we should say, and I think that's correct, is simply that when you have the general close of military operations, international armed conflict ends. However, not all of the law regulating international armed conflict ends. In particular, if you're a prisoner of war and you have not been repatriated, you're still in captivity. Even after the end of the conflict, IHL still applies to you and protects you. That's Article 5, GC3. Same goes for civilian, same goes for any kind of civilian person interned because of the conflict. The same goes for a number of other obligations and IHL. The obligation to suppress great breaches, of course, is relevant at the time they're committed. It's also relevant after when you want to prosecute those people. Some obligations, like the obligation to search for missing persons or to collect the dead, also continue after the end of the conflict. Now, the important thing to note here is that one big issue we have now, one big debate we're having, is whether IHL contains only rules that are restrictive or also rules that authorize, say, killing or detention. Whatever authority IHL grants, even if it does do that, ends at the time of the conflict. So once the conflict ends, if you detain a POW, you're actually violating their rights. You do not any longer have the right to detain that POW. So much so about IAC, one sentence about occupation. There's a big ICRC study thing they've done about the end of our occupation that I suggest you look at if you're interested in that issue. You can define this whole problem simply. If we say occupation means effective control of state A of the territory of state B without state B's consent, occupation can end in two ways. Either state A loses control or state B gives consent. That's easy. The exact scenarios in which this can happen are very complicated. So loss of control can happen through unilateral withdrawal or by being kicked out. Consent can be given by establishing a new government, which is the very dodgy problem that we can talk about later. Non-international conflict, sorry. The problem with non-international conflict is that the threshold is different. So here we have the intensity of unorganization thresholds that we do not have in international conflict. So we cannot really analogize here. There are, I think, two basic options we can use to assess whether ANIAC has ended. Option one is to do essentially what we do for international conflicts. We should say we wait until all the fighting has ended. Option two, and I think the legally correct option, is we look at, continuously look at whether the intensity of unorganization thresholds are satisfied. And they can no longer be satisfied at a certain point. Think, for example, post-surge Iraq where the U.S. effectively managed to degrade the capability of the organizations fighting it in Iraq, the insurgents, where the intensity level fell below a certain threshold. Think of Sri Lanka, how the conflict ended there. So that position would be essentially once the conflict goes below the threshold, which we will also require to happen with a degree of permanent stability, the ANIAC will end. In response to your question, actually, I think what you think, right? So I completely agree that the whole revolving door rationale is important in non-international conflicts as it is in international armed conflicts. So the end, however we define the end, still needs to be stable permanent. The question is whether for that end, we want an end to all the fighting, right? Which is what we do in international conflicts, basically. Or whether we will say, okay, at some point, the fighting might die out, the organizations may lose their command structure and so on, right? So there will still be some violence remaining, but we can still say that the law of non-international armed conflicts starts to stop applying because the NIC has ended. So think about Iraq, you know, I mean, I think that's the best example to test sort of these two sort of arguments. There was a point in time where the conflict really petered out. It was a short period of time, relatively speaking, maybe a couple of years, right? There was never a day in Iraq where some person wasn't killed in some kind of violent attack. But I think there came a point where many of the organizations that fought the United States and fought the Iraqi government simply stopped doing that. And then the conflict resumed under new heads, whatever. So that would be my thinking. But I completely agree with the policy rationale that we want stable, permanent end to the conflict. We do not want the revolving door.