 to King's College London for the invite, it is an honor to be here. I will do my normal disclaimer that I'm appearing in my academic capacity and by no means speaking on behalf of the office of the prosecutor. I will speak for probably 45 minutes, give us plenty of time for a conversation afterward. I imagine and hope that the presentation will elicit some comments and questions. So I look forward more to that than actually giving the lecture, but of course I have to give the lecture for you guys to be able to respond to it. So I want to begin with what I think is the most remarkable statement by an international law association that I have ever seen. This one made by the board of the European Society of International Law early last year in response to Russia's unprovoked and criminal invasion of Ukraine, and you can read it on the slide. Now, do Western violations of international law justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Absolutely not. But is it, quote, morally corrupt to highlight those violations because they are, quote, an irrelevant distraction? Well, I don't think so. And more importantly, because no one really cares what one lefty international lawyer believes, states in the global south don't seem to think so either because they have proven much less willing than western states to hold Russia accountable for the invasion. Now, consider the voting patterns in the General Assembly over the past two years. When states have simply been asked to condemn Russia's aggression, they have done so in large numbers. For example, one week after the invasion, states adopted resolution ES111 by a vote of 141 in favor and five against with 35 abstentions. But when states have been asked to impose actual consequences on Russia, voting has been far more fractured. Resolution ES113, which removed Russia from the Human Rights Council, was adopted by a vote of 93 states, four, 24 against, and 58 abstentions. The resolution thus passed with less than an absolute majority of the General Assembly, 48 percent. And, this is very important, consider the geographic distribution of votes. 61 percent of the states in Africa, 40 percent of the states in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 63 percent of the states in the Middle East either voted against the resolution or abstained on it. By contrast, 100 percent of the states in the Western Europe and others group voted in favor of the resolution. Now, the voting and resolution ES115, which calls for the creation of international reparations mechanism, was very similar to the voting on resolution ES113. Now, the west to south disparity is even more stark when it comes to prosecuting Russian leaders for the crime of aggression. The Friends of Accountability, a group of states that is committed to creating a new criminal tribunal for the invasion of Ukraine, has been meeting for more than 18 months and now has 47 members. Of those 47, a grand total of three are from the south, and none of those southern states are from Africa, Asia or the Middle East. We should, of course, always be skeptical of monocausal explanations of state behavior, particularly when we're talking about groups of states. And it seems clear that the South's reluctance to punish Russia is political as well as legal. The goodwill that many African states still feel for Russia because of Soviet support for decolonization, for example, obviously plays a role. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Yes, now we can see your slides. You can't see my slides when I'm... Now we can. Now we can. We stopped off the Friends of Accountability. So here we can see them. Now we lost it for a second. Apologies for that. Thank you. All right. So I'm an international lawyer, as you know. So I want to focus today on international law. More specifically, I want to defend two interrelated claims concerning the South's seeming reluctance to hold Russia accountable for the invasion of Ukraine. The first is that Russia's legal rationales for invading Ukraine are within the boundaries of plausible argument because, and only because, the West has for decades systematically ignored the South concerning the use of force. The second is that the lack of support for prosecuting Russian leaders for invading Ukraine is at least partially due to the West systematically ignoring the South concerning both the definition of aggression and the creation of institutions to prosecute it. Now my story I want to emphasize is not simply of one of Western double standards. The West is hypocritical, clearly so, but the problem is not that Western states have engaged in the same kinds of unlawful uses of force as Russia. The problem is that they have so fervently argued that their unlawful uses of force are actually lawful, that the use adbellum permits them to use force in the ways that they have. Simply put, and this is my central thesis today, those arguments have created a use adbellum regime whose invocation by Russia, despite being made an evident bad faith, enables the South to justify remaining neutral between Russia and the West. So let me start with the use of force. The European Society of International Law did not simply describe comparing Russia's invasion of Ukraine to previous Western uses of force as morally corrupt. It also condemned Russia's arguments regarding Ukraine as having, quote, no basis whatsoever, whether in fact or in law, and is a quote, cynical and perverse use of international law. I agree that Russia's claims are factually meritless. The same cannot be said, however, of its legal claims. To the contrary, far from being perverse, the legal rationales Russia has invoked to defend invading Ukraine actually fall well within the argumentative boundaries that Western states have established. Let's consider those rationales. The tour will be quick, but I hope it will be enlightening. First, Russia has repeatedly argued that its invasion of Ukraine was a lawful act of individual self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. As Putin said in his infamous February 24 speech, Russia had to invade Ukraine because it could not exist, quote, while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today's Ukraine. The correct response to this claim is a simple one. Ukraine never attacked Russia and self-defense is not available in response to threats of future attacks. If the West had taken the South seriously concerning self-defense, that would be the end of the argument. As we all know, Article 51 says, if an armed attack occurs, not if an armed attack is going to occur. Southern states have insisted literally for decades that Article 51 must be interpreted restrictively as prohibiting any kind of anticipatory self-defense. And let me just offer you three snippets of evidence. First, during the drafting of the Friendly Relations Declaration and the definition of aggression, very few states, overwhelmingly Western, defended the legality of any kind of anticipatory self-defense, even in response to imminent armed attacks. The vast majority of states, overwhelmingly Southern, insisted that Article 51 meant what it said and that the article's reference to the, quote, inherent right of self-defense did not change the analysis, an argument that is correct, by the way, if you examine the Travaux-Pépératoire of Article 51. Second, during the Cold War, Southern states repeatedly condemned anticipatory uses of force by the West, most notably in 1967, in response to Israel's invasion of Egypt during the Six-Day War. Third, in 2005, when the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, asserted that self-defense was permissible against imminent armed attacks, the non-aligned movement, representing 117 states from the Global South at the time, publicly and angrily rejected his position. Indeed, NAM's representatives specifically decried the fact that despite its members representing two-thirds of the United Nations, quote, the ideas and observations submitted by NAM have not been taken into consideration in the Secretary General's report. For these reasons and many others, a few Western international lawyers, such as Tom Rees, Christine Gray, have concluded that no form of anticipatory self-defense is currently lawful, but they are decidedly in the minority. Most Western lawyers, and certainly most Western states, take it as a matter of faith that at the very least self-defense is available in response to imminent threats, the Caroline standard. If Caroline immanence represented the outer limit of anticipatory self-defense, Russia's self-defense claim would still be well beyond the boundaries of acceptable argument. But of course the most powerful Western states have not been content with ignoring the 130-plus states who reject any kind of anticipatory self-defense, they have gone further. Now sometimes their efforts have been relatively modest, limiting themselves to endorsing self-defense in response to imminent threats, but stretching the definition of immanence well beyond the Caroline standard. Thus the statement on the slide offered in 2004 by the Attorney General of the UK, a definition that, as Christine Gray has noted, effectively renders the immanence requirement a dead letter. But even that has not been enough for some Western states, Israel and the US in particular. In 1981, for example, Israel attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak while it was still being built. Israel made no attempt to argue that an armed attack by Iraq was imminent. It simply claimed that it had the right to act in self-defense because the reactor would eventually produce nuclear weapons that Iraq could use against it. Now the General Assembly condemned Israel's attack by a vote of 194 and two against, Israel and the US of course, and 34 abstentions. But that did not dissuade the United States from affirming the legality of non-anticipatory self-defense two decades later in its infamous 2002 national security strategy. This robust endorsement of preemptive self-defense was not a one-off that the US cynically invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq. Not only did the 2006 national security strategy make the same claim, the US has gone even further in the context of self-defense against non-state actors. Who, for example, can forget this gem when a Pentagon spokesman was asked in 2014 what armed attack justified striking the materials Coruscant Group in Syria. Now, neither the UK's endorsement of non-imminent eminence, nor the US and Israel's quote bad dude theory of non-anticipatory self-defense, is consistent with the U.S. Belem. The point, however, is not that such self-defense is lawful. The point instead is twofold. First, the Russia's expansionist position on self-defense in Ukraine bears an uncanny legal resemblance to the expansionist positions taken by the UK, Israel, and the US. And second, that those expansionist positions are legally cognizable only because the West has ignored the South's decades-long insistence on reading Article 51 restrictively. Russia has also justified its invasion of Ukraine as collective self-defense of the People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. This claim should be easy to dismiss because it is Black Letter Usa Belem that only a state can request collective self-defense, and there is no coherent argument that either the LPR or the DPR is a state. Both are quote independent of Ukraine, only because of Russia's previous unlawful use of force, and both are completely dependent on Russia for their continued existence. But even here, there is Western state practice that smudges Black Letters. Consider the Vietnam War. The US justified its bombing of North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder, as collective self-defense of South Vietnam. The Lawyer's Committee on American Policy toward Vietnam, whose most prominent member was none other than the arch-realist Hans Morgenthau, challenged that justification, arguing that South Vietnam was not a state because it was completely dependent on the US, a position shared at the time by nearly all of the states in the global South. In response, the US acknowledged that South Vietnam quote may lack some of the attributes of an independent sovereign state, but it nevertheless insisted that it was a quote recognized international entity and was thus entitled to ask for and receive outside support. Now, Russia is also hardly alone in prematurely recognizing the statehood of various political entities. To take only the most obvious example, the US, the UK, and France recognized Kosovo the day after it declared independence. At a time when Kosovo did not satisfy the Montevideo criteria because of its dependence on the UN and NATO, and it was Lex Ferenda to claim that a people, which the Kosovars were not, were entitled to external self-determination if they had been the victim of human rights abuses. Even today, despite the West treating Kosovo's statehood as essentially a fate accompli, only 101 of the world's 194 states have recognized it, 38 states less than have recognized Palestine, and nearly all of the holdouts for Kosovo are in the global South. A third Russian rationale for the invasion of Ukraine is that it was acting to protect its nationals from harm, Russian passport holders, and Donbas in particular. States in the global South have insisted for more than a century that they do not accept protection of nationals as a legitimate exception to the prohibition of the use of force. Consider four quick examples. In the 1950s, Southern states specifically rejected the exception during the negotiations over what would become the definition of aggression. Second, Southern states reiterated their objection during the negotiations over the international convention on the taking of hostages. Third, numerous Southern states spoke out against the exception during debates over the ILC's draft articles on diplomatic protection. And fourth, and perhaps most important, Southern states have consistently condemned specific Western uses of force directed at rescuing nationals, from Israel's raid at Antebi in Uganda in 1976 to the U.S.'s invasion of Panama in 1989. If this was the only state practice and opinion of yours we had, Russia's protection of national's argument would be as legally problematic as it is factually problematic. But once again, Western states have weakened the legal case against Russia by ignoring the South. In all of the venues just mentioned, and from Antebi to Panama, Western states, and here particularly the U.S., the U.K., Belgium, France, and Israel, have repeatedly insisted that using force to protect nationals is an inherent part of the right of self-defense and thus lawful. Like Tom Rees and Christine Gray, I think they are wrong about that, but the West has nevertheless opened the legal door to the argument and Russia has enthusiastically strode through it. Now before moving away from self-defense, I want to say a few words about annexation. Resolution ES-11-1, supported by both Western and Southern states, explicitly condemns Russia's annexation to various parts of Ukraine, and rightly so. It's worth noting though that the U.S. is hardly opposed to territorial annexation, at least when the annexer is one of its allies. In 2019, the U.S. recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967, and in 2020, the U.S. recognized Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara. The U.S. made no attempt at all to offer legal justification for Western Sahara. As for the Golan Heights, it invoked the almost universally rejected concept of, quote, defensive annexation. The idea that it is legally permissible for a state to annex territory, as long as it occupied that territory, defending itself against an armed attack. Or, as noted international lawyer Benjamin Netanyahu put it more concisely, quote, if occupied in a defensive war, then it's ours. Now the fourth and final Russian rationale for the invasion of Ukraine, and perhaps the most notorious, is humanitarian intervention. To quote Putin again, quote, the purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. I've written extensively about why unilateral humanitarian intervention is both unlawful and criminal. Suffice it to say here that no state in the global south has ever affirmed the legality of intervening for ostensibly humanitarian purposes without the blessing of the Security Council. And more than 140, including the entirety of the non-aligned movement, the Arab League and the G77, have explicitly and repeatedly condemned such interventions as unlawful. Now fortunately, unlike many Western scholars, Western states overwhelmingly agree here with the south. But even here there are exceptions. At various times the UK, Belgium, Denmark, and New Zealand have each claimed that humanitarian intervention is lawful even without Security Council authorization. That alone weakens the legal case against Russia's invocation of it. NATO's unlawful intervention in Kosovo, however, is even more legally debilitating. As you no doubt know, the Independent International Commission for Kosovo, so international that one of its 10 members was from Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East, infamously described the intervention as, quote, illegal but legitimate. That phase adequately describes the positions most NATO states took before and during the intervention, insisting that they were acting for purely humanitarian reasons, while refusing to formally assert the legality of unilateral humanitarian intervention. That kind of manipulation of the USAD Bellum, so patently instrumental, undermines the West's ability to dismiss Russia's humanitarian intervention claim as legally mirrorless. So that's the use of force. I want to turn now to the crime of aggression. The West might have unclean hands, but it is absolutely right to insist that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was a criminal act for which Russian political and military leaders must be held accountable. As I noted earlier, though, states in the global South have been very reluctant to impose actual consequences on Russia. Not only have they opposed or abstained in large numbers from general assembly resolutions, removing Russia from the Human Rights Council and calling for an international reparations mechanism, they have shown almost no interest in working with the West to create a new criminal tribunal to prosecute Russian leaders for aggression. If that is the case, I would suggest the West has only itself to blame. For decades, the West resisted Southern efforts to define and criminalize aggression. For decades, the West, led by the United States, used force against the South in ways the South considered criminal without even a whisper of accountability. Iran, 1953, the Dominican Republic, 1965, Nicaragua, 1984, Iraq, 2003, and on, and on, and on. It is only now, when a political and economic rival invades a West-leaning state, that the West has suddenly rediscovered the importance of the crime of aggression. And unfortunately, and I mean that sincerely because it is unfortunate, it is almost certainly too late. Simply put, if you ignore Southern voices long enough, you should not be surprised when they refuse to heed your call. Let's start with definitional issues. The West likes to take credit for creating the crime of aggression, and there's no question that the US, UK, and France played an essential role in ensuring that the crime was prosecuted in Nuremberg. For the next seven decades, however, Western states bitterly opposed any attempt by the international community to define aggression in a manner that could conceivably be applied to them. Indeed, as Omar Bah has explained, the South had to drag the West kicking and screaming into a general definition of aggression, and the process took nearly three decades, floundering until the General Assembly finally adopted Resolution 3314 in 1974. Western states only supported Resolution 3314, however, because they were able to neuter it during the negotiations. To begin with, the UK insisted on inserting, quote, a war of at the beginning of Article five two, which defined the crime of aggression. Before the change, all of the acts in Article three would have qualified as crimes against peace. After it, only one act did. Classic interstate wars. Even worse, Western states made sure that the definition of aggression would not have any independent legal force. They did so by insisting on including Articles two and four in the resolution, which together make clear that the Security Council is not obligated to deem any particular act aggressive, even one in Article three. Now, the definition of aggression is not the only example of the West ignoring the South concerning the use of force. A few years earlier, when negotiating the friendly relations declaration, a group of Southern states, Algeria, Burma, Cameroon, Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Algeria, the United Arab Republic and Yugoslavia, introduced a joint proposal deeming, quote, economic coercion, a critical Western tool for maintaining dominance over newly decolonized states, a use of force that was capable, if serious enough, of giving or triggering the right of self-defense. Now, Western states made sure that the proposal went nowhere. The West also ignored the South during the long process that led to the adoption of the draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind in 1996. Between 1983 and 1996, Southern commissioners succeeded in getting the ILC to include in the code a variety of crimes particularly important to states in the South, such as colonial domination, apartheid, mercenarism and drug trafficking. The Western commissioners bitterly opposed each and every one of those crimes. And by the time the code was adopted, only war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression were left. We call these four, of course, the core international crimes. That description itself reflects the marginalization of the South and international criminal law. Those crimes are core only because the West succeeded in making them so. Now, many Western states, particularly the ones with a permanent veto in the Security Council, would have been very happy if the crime of aggression had remained nothing more than an article in the ILC draft code. But that was a non-starter for states in the global South who were all too aware of the limits of the friendly relations declaration and the definition of aggression. They wanted a crime of aggression and they wanted it to be contained in a legally binding treaty. So they pushed for it again and again from the earliest negotiations in Rome in 1998 to activation in New York in 2017. Now, the adoption of the aggression amendments at the ICC is a genuine success. It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that the crime of aggression in the Rome statute is but a pale shadow of the crime that most Southern states envisioned. Indeed, I predicted it in an article a few years ago entitled, quote, who is afraid of the crime of aggression that the court will never witness an actual aggression prosecution. And I stand behind that prediction. Why is that the case? Because the West wanted it that way. Once they realized that an ICC without the crime of aggression was a non-starter for the South, Western states went from opposing the crime to attempting to neuter it. And neuter it, they did. I don't have time to discuss every aspect of the crime of aggression that represents the triumph of Western states over Southern ones. So I'll limit myself to mentioning two of the most important, one definitional, one jurisdictional. The definitional limit is the manifest violation requirement in article eight, this one. During the aggression negotiations, Southern states wanted to make up for the limits of the definition of aggression by criminalizing all of the acts listed in resolution 3314, not just wars of aggression. They lost that battle because Western states led by the United States insisted that it was not enough to violate the prohibition of the use of force in article 24 of the UN Charter. The use of force also had to be a, quote, manifest violation of the Charter by its character, gravity, and scale. Western states insisted on including the manifest qualifier in article eight, this for a very simple reason. They wanted to make sure that their uses of force, particularly anticipatory self-defense and unilateral humanitarian intervention, could never be deemed the crime of aggression. The US was particularly shameless in this regard. Concerned that the manifest qualifier would leave too much discretion to the ICC's judges, it tried to explicitly exempt humanitarian intervention from the crime of aggression by introducing an understanding that would have prohibited the court from finding a manifest violation when it was, quote, objectively evident that a use of force was intended to prevent international crimes. That understanding was overwhelmingly rejected by the assembly of state's parties, particularly by states in the global south. Undeterred, the US then proposed yet another understanding, one that would have required the judges to consider a state's motivation for using force when deciding whether an aggressive act was a manifest violation. That proposal also failed. We will probably never know whether the manifest violation requirement will exempt Western uses of force from the crime of aggression, and that's because of the jurisdictional limit the West coerced the South into accepting, namely the exclusion of non-member states. The ICC has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide when they are committed on the territory of a state party, even when the perpetrator's state is not a member of the court. Southern states wanted the same jurisdictional regime to apply to aggression, but Western ones, led by the US, the UK and France, but with the support of Australia and Canada, made clear that they would rather the aggression negotiations fail completely than give the court the ability to prosecute non-member states for aggression. As Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary, revealingly admitted at the time, quote, this is not a court set up to bring to book prime ministers of the United Kingdom or presidents of the United States. Had the West listened to the South instead of insisting on excluding non-member states from the crime of aggression, the international community would not have needed to spend the past year trying to find a way to prosecute Putin and his minions. Even worse, some of the same individuals responsible for kneecapping the ICC now cite that kneecapping is a reason to create a new special tribunal for the crime of aggression. Gordon Brown, for example, the former prime minister of the UK, recently described the ICC's inability to prosecute Putin for aggression as a quote, jurisdictional loophole, conveniently failing to mention the central role that his own government played in opening that loop in the first place. Now, there is, of course, another reason why a new aggression tribunal is necessary, the permanent veto at the Security Council. The council could refer Russia's aggression to the ICC, but Russia would veto it. The council could also create a new tribunal that every state in the world would be obligated to cooperate with, but Russia would veto it. I'm sure you know, the permanent veto is the price that states paid to get the P5 to support creating the UN. And the P5 has bitterly opposed efforts to reform the Security Council ever since, being particularly dismissive of the non-aligned movement's regular calls to either eliminate the permanent veto or add two new permanent members from the South. The P5, other than France, have not even been willing to consider a collective and voluntary agreement among themselves to never veto a resolution that is intended to end mass atrocities. And of course, one member of the P5, the US, has routinely used its permanent veto to frustrate one of the South's key priorities, namely holding Israel accountable for its permanent occupation of the West Bank and its unlawful annexation of other states' territory. Over the past 50 years, the US has vetoed 81 resolutions in the Security Council. More than double the former Soviet Union and Russia combined. 42 of those 81 vetoes have concerned Israel. It's impossible to understand the South's reluctance to get behind Western efforts to hold Russia accountable for the invasion of Ukraine without considering these indignities. Those who live by the permanent veto die by the permanent veto. Now, let me conclude by saying a few words about why the West decades-long silencing of the Global South concerning the use of force is so important. I am not going to give you some flowery, impassioned defense of a restrictive reading of the Yusuf Bellum, as if Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if only the legal case against anticipatory self-defense was clearer or if only the ICC had brought a jurisdiction over the crime of aggression. I don't believe the Yusuf Bellum has that kind of power to constrain and deter, particularly when it comes to the use of force by powerful states. But that doesn't mean that a state's ability to provide a cognizable legal justification for a use of force is irrelevant. On the contrary, international relations scholars have long pointed out that in our heavily juridified age, legal rationales for the use of force have a much greater valence than rationales that are more nakedly political or even ethical. To be sure, the argument can easily be overstated. The world's most powerful states, the US and China, do not always have to justify their uses of force because the appearance of legality is often irrelevant to their ability to exercise power. The US's attack on the Shirat airbase in Syria in 2017, which it did not even try to legally justify, is an example. Russia, however, is not the US or China. As Anastasia Katova and Dina Tsuvala have recently pointed out, Russia is at best a regional imperial power whose political, economic, and even military influence has declined precipitously over the past four decades. Russia's repeated failures in Ukraine, revealing its military to be a little more than a murderous Potemkin village attest to that fact. What this means, I would suggest, is that Russia does not have the luxury to ignore international law, even when it is so obviously flouting it. It can invade Ukraine, but it cannot do so with the hegemonic silence that is the privilege of its more powerful rivals. It must cloak its invasion of Ukraine in a veneer of use-ud-bellum respectability. To be sure, that veneer can be easily stripped away by even a modest application of factual scrutiny. As I said when I began this lecture, Russia's factual claims are meritless. In some cases, such as its claim to be quote denazifying Ukraine, comically so. The West, however, is not Russia's audience. The global South is. And herein, I think, lies the importance of Russia's legal arguments. The enable Southern states to justify what Jorge Haina, a Chilean ambassador-trend scholar, has called active non-alignment, not picking aside in the war in Ukraine in favor of building bridges with both sides. Southern states have little to gain politically or economically from joining the West in its crusade to hold Russia's leaders accountable, especially given that China is Russia's most important ally. At the same time, though, as scholars like Sabenyam and Troyore and Alonso Grimendi have noted, the South has always been far more committed than the North to the prohibition of the use of force, to the territorial integrity of states, and to the crime of aggression. How can states in the South, in good conscience, ignore what seems to be such a blatant violation of every international law principle that they have traditionally held dear? The answer, I believe, comes from that clever little qualifier, seems to be. Russia's legal rationales from invading Ukraine are not important because they convince Western lawyers like us or even Western states like the U.S. They are important because they allow Southern states to tell themselves and tell each other that they can remain neutral in the conflict between the West and Russia without abandoning their commitment, however strategic or imperfect, to a restrictive Usad Belem. Let me be clear, I am not saying that Southern states believe or accept Russia's legal claims. The vast majority are almost certainly as unconvinced by them as we are in the West. But those legal claims don't need to be convincing. They simply need to be good enough for the South to justify its act of non-alignment. For that limited purpose, Russia's legal claims are good enough. And why are they good enough? Because they are the same legal claims the West has been making for decades to justify its uses of force almost always over the bitter opposition of the South. And because the West is no less willing than Russia to invent whatever facts are necessary to support expansive legal claims. Who can forget, for example, one of many possible, President Bush's oft-repeated claim in 1990 that Saddam Hussein had ordered dozens of babies pulled from their incubators and left to die. Had the West taken the South's views on the use of force and the crime of aggression more seriously, the Usad Belem would look very different than it does now. Different enough, in fact, that Russia's rationales for invading Ukraine would be so legally beyond the pale that Southern states would find it much more difficult to rationalize refusing to heed Western calls to punish Russian leaders for their sins. So to conclude, if the South's neutrality concerning accountability for Russia is a tragedy, and I would argue that indeed it is, it is a tragedy largely of the West's own making. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kevin, for this very rich presentation and very strong argumentation. I'm pretty sure that our audience will have many, many questions and comments, and I have as well, but I would like to give the floor first to our audience. I don't know if you want to remove your slides, so you can, I don't know if that's an option, you know, so you can see more people. Yeah, I mean, stop sharing. Sorry, yeah, teams. Okay, great. Perfect. But I would like to encourage our audience, people who attended your presentation, to raise questions, comments, and even, you know, to take the floor. You can raise your hand and take the floor and comment and ask questions. You can throw things at your own screens. That's true, you know, as well. So who would like to take the floor first, please? I'm pretty sure we have many, it's impossible not to have so many questions about your observations. Or I'm so incredibly convincing that everybody is just stunned and to agree upon silence. That can be also the case, you know, that's another explanation. Anyone, please? Okay, then maybe, you know, I can take the floor before other people step in. And there is a lot of discussion about the language of international law and how it is used and abused, you know. Some of the critical legal scholars say it's not abused. It's just interpreted a different way. And from the beginning of your presentation, you said, you know, how Western states tried to present unlawful acts as lawful using the language of international law. And this is something, you know, that we have seen also that the language of international law remains. Russia used the same language of international law. And actually, you know, there was also these comments and observations, but you did the same thing. I have a question because, you know, it's a personal question. It's something that I'm very troubled. We spend all these years, scholars, everyone, this is a question I raised to everyone talking about the crime of aggression, the importance of the crime of aggression. And I feel we're in a parallel reality here. We teach the crime of aggression, you know, as the prohibition of aggression is being prohibitory. No, you know, we talk about use Coggins, we talk about our governments obligations with some hesitations. And then after the activation in the wrong standard, we say this is a new legal reality that also influences neutrality and other sub themes of international law. And personally, I don't know, I feel I have this inconvenience. I understand, you know, your arguments about the global south and how they can be a kind of neutral or non aligned, still legally normatively, have we made any change at the end of the day? How all this fast about the crime of aggression? That's a tough question. I mean, we have made some progress, right? I mean, the international community argued over aggression with very little success for 70 years. We did ultimately settle on a definition of aggression. You know, if I was the king of international law, would I accept exactly the same definition that we find in the Rome statue? Probably not. But it's pretty close. It's a good definition. I think it's a definition that most states should be able to agree on. The devil, of course, is in the jurisdictional details. I think it is important that the aggression amendments were adopted. I think it's important symbolically that we have kind of concluded the legacy of Nuremberg by finally adopting a definition of the crime of aggression. But of course we have, at least in terms of the one extant international organization, effectively neutered that crime. You know, as I said during the presentation, I seriously doubt any of us will ever see an aggression prosecution at the ICC. And you go and you look at the, I think it's either 44 or 45 states that have ratified the crime of aggression. Good luck finding a state on that list that's going to invade one of its neighbors. But it's still it's still not nothing. And I think that it's not nothing in the sense that if you look, you know, I think over the next couple of years, you will see a lot more states, probably in the north, in the west, ratifying the aggression amendments because of that need to not appear too overtly hypocritical. It's very hard to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the crime of aggression when, even though you're a member of the court, you have refused to ratify the aggression amendments. And so there's a number of states and, you know, particularly in the in the Scandinavian region of Europe and in other parts of Europe that I think will ratify the aggression amendments over the next few years. And I think that, again, that's a testament to the symbolic importance of the crime. But in terms of actual prosecution of aggression, you know, it is not evident what avenue one could pursue to really do that. And I don't want to get into the whole definition, you know, the whole argument about the special, special tribunal. But, you know, it is the combination of important symbolism and extremely hazardous great power politics. But, of course, we never get away from that in international law and aggression, I think, makes that point with particular clarity. Thank you. I see we have Christopher Poole. Chris, would you like to take the floor please for a question? Yeah, first of all, you know, thank you so much for the presentation. It's very, very, very enlightening. If I may, you know, the parties you mentioned are Russia, the West, and the Global South. I mean, one pretty important actor missing from that list is Ukraine itself. Ukraine has been quite understandably one of the chief advocates of these sort of legal initiatives. And I wonder to what extent the Global South sees Ukraine as being part of the West. And one thing that I'm noticing is the more that the Global South engages with Ukraine itself, the more that the global south or, you know, elements of the global south see some sort of similarities with Ukraine's position in terms of being, you know, the subject of colonial attack. You know, I can't say too much about it, but there are initiatives being made to connect, you know, civil society groups in the Global South with Ukrainians themselves. And I suspect that this may kind of, you know, develop some of the some of the legal initiatives that have been put forward. No, I mean, it's, you know, it's an incredibly important point and question, you know, in terms of kind of Ukraine's role in the various kind of, you know, again, oversimplifying categories that I use, you know, I would just, I would strongly recommend Patrick Labuta's writing on the treatment of Ukraine as, you know, in its colonial past. I don't agree with everything that Patrick argues, but he makes a very powerful point about, you know, how we should think of Ukraine and its own legacy of being, you know, essentially colonized. You know, in terms of aggression, Ukraine is essentially, I think, caught, you know, in this much larger web of power politics. As I tried to imply in the top, in the abstract, Ukraine should absolutely be a situation to which the global South, and again, oversimplifying is committed. You know, and again, I recommend Benjamin Fiori's writing on the very, very long, unbroken dedication of states in the South to the prohibition of the use of force and territorial integrity and the crime of aggression. It would be hard to imagine a situation in a, you know, relatively Western state that would appeal more to the longstanding sensibilities and commitments of the South. But the South is also trapped between the great powers in terms of Russia, China, and the United States. And I think that, again, I'm just using the, you know, the writing of others, but this idea of active neutrality, I do think it explains a lot. I don't think the states in the South don't view Russia's invasion as the crime of aggression. I am quite sure that almost all of them do. But the question is, do they have anything to gain by getting on board these Western initiatives to punish Russia when they're the ones whose populations are going to starve to death if there is no grain shipped out of Ukraine? You know, it's as simple to me, a simple kind of weighing of priorities that they put their more immediate political and economic needs over their kind of more abstract international law commitments. But that's not an easy thing to do. If you spent 70 years constantly advocating for the rules that I think the West has diluted, it is hard to just say, well, we care more about our economics now. And that's why I argue that that's the role that these rationalizations play, that allows them to maintain a veneer of respectability by saying, oh, it's actually fairly complicated. The legal case, not the factual one, because the claims are so absurd. But the legal case is just, it's an open question whether Russia is really violated these principles. And again, I think they know that they have, but it again, it allows a certain kind of cover to them to not have to take sides in the battle that they don't get anything out of. There is nothing in it really for many states in the South to see a new tribunal created that will almost certainly never actually have anyone in the dock to prosecute. So I think that's the argument that I have been trying to build up. But I don't want to strip Ukraine of agency. I would love to see a widely supported legitimate mechanism to prosecute Putin and others created, one supported by states in the South. I'm just skeptical that that will actually happen. I can see we have comments, questions in the chat. So I'm going through them first. Well, I'm going through Isoiva and another participant. I will give the floor to Rachel, Rachel Kerr, who is in the audience. Rachel, you have the floor. Thank you. You hear me, okay? Oh, you can see me as well now. Hi. Thanks, Maria. Thank you, Kevin. Hello. It was a great talk. I was sort of prompted to ask my question because I'm sitting here thinking pretty much the same things as Eva. And I saw Eva's message in the chat and it's really a question of, I thought, oh, should I ask that because it seems a bit kind of open-ended and maybe quite close to what Maria was asking as well. It's just this sort of sense of, well, what do we do? What do we do with all of this? Are we in a state? What do you see as the end game? If this is an end game, what do we just keep kind of bumbling on saying, well, the law, the law is the law and we can sort of tip away at things and look at aggression. For example, in the examples you gave, maybe more states will ratify, but in the end it will be those states that probably aren't going to go and invade another state anyway. So that's not much of a deterrent impact. Do we just accept, I suppose, do we just accept the limitations of the law and the way that it's bound up in politics, which is, or is there a different end game in sight? And in that context, would you sort of mention that the potential for a tribunal, would that help? And if so, what would need to happen to get there, to get to a tribunal that's going to prosecute Putin for aggression, or is there another avenue that might be more conducive? For example, could the ICJ be used and would that have an impact? So sorry, that's a bit of a kind of fumbling, wide-ranging question, but it's just this sense of, I just would like to get your views on kind of where we are and do we just kind of accept it and shrug our shoulders again and say, well, this is the way that international law operates and you kind of chip away and chip away and things get slightly better, but then they get worse again and then they get better again and we'll just look at it. Or is there a different end game in sight? Oh, that's an easy, easy question. I want to say something kind of wonderfully optimistic, but it's not really my nature in this particular area. I think it's also misplaced. I mean, it's difficult to see anything particularly progressive happening in the use at Belem. We seem to be unfortunately going the opposite direction. I suppose, and I try to do this in a lot of my writing, just to emphasize that there is so much kind of untapped legal power among states in the South that are not being taken advantage of. There's a lot more states that we could consider Southern than we could consider Western. They're not all as powerful, as the China's and the US's, but from a legal standpoint, in a world where we still have to at least tip our hat to sovereign equality, there's lawmaking power there. The biggest problem that I see in the use at Belem is just the kind of lack of interest in the actual details. I mean, there's a reason why I'm an old fashioned positivist. I'm an old fashioned positivist because positivism gives us a language that can be used to discuss and argue about and make legal claims regarding international law. If law is just power, if we're just supposed to look at law as the social practices of elites, well, then the powerful states are the ones who are always going to make law because law just becomes synonymous with power. If we actually think that legal rules exist, independent of the practice that gives rise to them, and we believe that you do actually have to find state practice at Pinoyuris behind certain extensions of the law, we can have, I think, a constructive argument and show why the US's claim to be able to use the force on any territory that is unable or unwilling to deal in the US's view with a non-state actor, we can show how that actually has an incredibly weak pedigree. We can say, no, there's not state practice at Pinoyuris. You can't just simply use this force in light of the fact that for decades, states in the South have been insisting on not expanding the UN Charter or on reading it restrictively. You never eliminate power that way, of course, but at least it gives you a vocabulary to make claims and to articulate hopefully a common position. We need to make the West defend their uses of force in the vocabulary that is recognized by international law, and we need states that are in the South to be more assertive and aggressive in making counterclaims and requiring those claims to be made. Again, there's a lot more states in the South. I published an article a couple of years ago on specially affected states, and everybody has always treated the concept of specially affected states in the formation of custom as literally just another tool of hegemony. The US claiming it's specially affected by everything because it's just so powerful. That's not the way that the doctrine works. It's not the way the doctrine should work, and I advocated in that article that states in the South should insist on the ways in which they are specially affected and their particularly important role in the formation of custom. Will they do that? I don't know, they're not listening to me. I don't pretend to have that much influence, but it's out there. These concepts are there. The USAD-Bellum is a set of rules that come from somewhere and that we can argue about, and I think we need to do more of that. In terms of the Tribunal itself, states have been trying for quite some time to create a Tribunal. I've participated in some of those debates. It's hard to see a way to put Putin in the dock. I do think the argument that a widely accepted General Assembly resolution asserting the right to create an international court that didn't have to recognize personal immunity, I think it works. But again, notice what the proponents of that are doing. They're not saying we need 140 states representing all of the four corners of the earth to join this resolution. They say, no, no, all you need is that you just needed to pass or a couple scholars have said you only just need 60 votes as long as it passed. So less than one third of the entire UN's membership, again, which will almost overwhelmingly be Northern states, will be able to create a Tribunal that set aside personal immunity. Well, how do you justify that when you have essentially an entire continent of Africa, the African Union collectively opposed to even the ICC setting aside the personal immunity of the head of state, the head of government, and the foreign minister? That kind of incredibly ends driven pragmatic view of the law, I think does more harm than good in the long run. So I think it's exactly what you were actually what the previous commenter said, which is they need to actually do the hard diplomatic work of getting states in the South to support some kind of non overtly selective mechanism to prosecute Russian aggression. Because again, I think they understand and accept that it's aggression. I think in the abstract, they would like to see it prosecuted because it does reflect so many of their deep seated beliefs. But there has to be a persuasive legal mechanism, and it also has to take into account their own need to make sure again that the grain keeps flowing and to not piss off China too much. So I have no great answers or great uplifting speech to give, but I do think there are tools out there that could be made use of in a smarter way than we've seen them used. Don't think that's really answered your question, but that's because I don't think I really have one, Rachel. Thanks, Kevin and Rachel. I think you responded to Eva's question as well. We have a question on the chat, so I ask Anna who wrote the comment to take the floor. Anna, are you with us? Can you take the floor? Yes. Hi. Hi. Thank you, Professor Hada. I thought that presentation was excellent, and I thought I completely agree with basically everything you said. Let's move on to the next person. I do have one question. I think my perception of what you said was that it was a little bit like touch on the autonomy and the responsibility of southern states in the Ukraine and Russia conflict. From what you've said, I think it's surely the case that the Global South has been just as problematic and hypocritical by failing to condemn conduct, which in other circumstances they have condemned when it was coming from the West. And you say that the West has sort of set up the scene for the South to kind of benefit from this expansive view of self-defense and collective defense and so forth. But the South is still choosing to adopt that expansive view rather than doubling down on their kind of long-held conception of aggression because it suits them to be neutral now because of fighting with Russia and China. And so what I wonder without, for example, the war on terror, would you really be able to say that the South would actually be condemning Russia if we hadn't had this expansive sort of rhetoric 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Would they really be seeking accountability for Russian war crimes from day one? And frankly, are the South's political gains any less justified now than the West's war tried to see all 30 years ago? This sort of game for tit for tat is it really right at this point to kind of just blame the West for what we're seeing and this kind of lack of condemnation from the Global South? And then if I may, another question very briefly, in this kind of a sort of utopia of a permanent fire world with no veto. And part of the issue that we have here is Russia is sort of coming up with these claims that justify its turning to the imminent and anticipatory self-defense of this being natified and all of these claims that we've heard before. But if we had a P5-less world, would it be an insecurity council without a P5, sort of judging the veracity of these claims? Who would be the ones to say, well, no, wait a second, you can't move forward with these, what you're saying, it just doesn't add up? So what would be your conception in this kind of veto-less world? Also two difficult questions. On the first one, I don't want to make too much of my argument. I believe my argument, but I don't want to say it's like some master narrative that explains everything. I do think it is interesting that when you look at the two or maybe three votes in the General Assembly, where it's just symbolic condemnation, you do see a tremendous number of states, including in the South, voting for them. And that's like, you know, ES 11-1, where they condemn the invasion or, you know, another one where they condemn annexation. So when it's just symbolic, you know, they stick to their kind of traditional view that's quite restrictive of the USAT-bellum. It's when they call for consequences in the General Assembly, resolutions that are introduced by Western states that they seem to get cold feet. And so I think the validity of your point is that it is not evident that their very kind of real politic political and economic interests would be any different if we had a much more restrictive USAT-bellum. It is very possible that faced with a choice between, you know, a really clear affirmation of a USAT-bellum that reflects their ideas and grain being sent, they would still go with the grain. They may very well. I would be foolish to deny that. But I do think that it to some extent matters that they have arguments to invoke or, you know, a vocabulary or a set of arguments to justify not taking sides. That I think is the tragedy of kind of the expansion of the USAT-bellum. It just makes it too easy for them to say, you know, these arguments are all complicated. There's an open argument for legality. Let's not talk about the facts too much. And we'll just stay out of it and let China and Russia and the US fight about it. So again, I don't want to overstate it. I'm, you know, I always think, of course, in the end, the specific economic and political and various other interests of states will rule out. But unless we don't think that international law as a rhetoric has any importance in international relations, then I do think it matters at the margins. With your second question, sorry, just repeat the second, just one sentence, second question again. I couldn't hear any of that. Maria, do you remember the second question? Yeah, we can not hear you very well. I think you had to do the veto, right? What's sorry, thank you. What the world? Well, I mean, okay, we're obviously in the realm of science fiction. I would love, every state in the world other than the P5 to en masse withdrawal from the UN Charter and then immediately start UN 2.0 with no permanent veto. But if the world would look different without the permanent veto, I mean, the reason we have to spend so much time talking about how to create a special tribunal is the fact that the General Assembly, which is the only democratic forum at the UN, doesn't have coercive power. It can recommend, but it can't order. And so the one institution that does have some binding force is completely dominated by the P5. And so right off the bat, we know exactly what is and is not cognizable within the realm of international reaction to things like atrocities. So would it be a better world if there was just a General Assembly and no Security Council? I don't know, probably. It would create some questions of its own. But I do think that whatever validity there was to giving the victorious allies permanent vetoes right after World War II, although again, largely at the point of blackmail, the world has changed. And if there is going to be a permanent veto, it can't be monopolized by just the same powers in 1949. I don't know who I would give the permanent veto to. I mean, there's Germany, Brazil, India, I mean, there's South Africa. There are some other major players. And I think the problem, of course, is just we don't live in a bipolar world like we did during the Cold War. We don't live in a unipolar world of US hegemony after the collapse of communism. We live in a truly multipolar world that is not reflected in the Security Council. And I don't know whether actually taking into account that multiplicity would make a better world. But at least from a decision-making standpoint, it would be more fair. But we have the Security Council and there's nothing that we can do with it. And I get the tip of my hat to my friend, Tamsin Flippa Page. I get very frustrated every time I read some blog post, oh, let's throw the Russia out of the Security Council. Let's strip the US of its veto. I mean, we can all think that that's a wonderful idea, but it just doesn't work because of the UN Charter. So yeah, that's my extremely inadequate answer to your second question. Thank you, Kevin and Anna. Is there any other question and comment someone who'd like to take the floor? Okay, because if it's okay, I have a question. It was related, I think, to Annans. It is a kind of a follow-up. Kevin, I share with you a lot of the critique and I think I really believe that the picture is way more nuanced. You mentioned previously the article by Patrick Labuda about colonialism. And I was wondering, there are many reasons how people, I will give the floor as well afterwards to the other participants, there are many reasons, and you mentioned about that political, financial, historical reasons, how people, how states voted before the General Assembly. But you said that you really believe that there is this endorsement of the condemnation of aggression by the global south. So I was wondering, to what extent a more emancipatory use of the legal language by the global south would be also more beneficial to them, instead of a non-aligned kind of abstention in their voting or in their condemnation of Russia's aggression? Because usually, you know, we condemn, criticize the west or the global north, whatever it is. But what about, you know, if there is this legal condemnation about aggression, I'm talking about law here, you know, why, how beneficial is actually this position where you have this type of, I wouldn't call it neutrality, but the abstention distance, you know, from the condemnation? And that comes to my second comment. There are some commentators, some discussion, although I think it's very unlikely that maybe all this critique and all this chaos with the crime of aggression in Ukraine, maybe that give a different poos to a possible, you know, reassessment of the crime of aggression within the ICC Rome statute, should some more state from the global south be more inclusive, more active in this sense, you know, about this legal discourse? That's mine. Yeah. No, I mean, again, it's an excellent question. But I think partly this is what I'm trying to get at, that I would love to see states in the South be more aggressive in terms of promoting their legal claims and their legal interests. But they have been for 70 years making the same points. They have insisted on interpreting the Article 24 restrictively. They've insisted that anticipatory self-defense is not legal. They insist that humanitarian intervention is not legal. They assume that, you know, a self-defense against non-state actors on an unwhaling or unable theory is not legal. And they're ignored. I mean, it's, you know, read any kind of Western law review, look at any debate in the West, it is just taken for granted. Well, of course, you can respond to, you know, an imminent attack. Of course, you know, you can use self-defense against a non-state actor. Of course, you know, on and on and on and on. So they've just been ignored. They were ignored about the charter and they've been ignored about the institutional architecture and even the very definition of the crime of aggression. You know, that's kind of what I was trying to show in the talk. So although I don't think that justifies just like giving up and not making legal claims, you know, I think there's a reason why that, you know, faced with essentially a Western brick wall about all of their legal arguments for the past seven decades, they say, okay, well, obviously our views don't matter on the use of Belem, but we're going to make sure that the grain flows. That's at least my sense. That doesn't mean give up the emancipatory potential of international law. I mean, I think that is, you know, we can, I think all of us who are critically minded agree that international law is not primarily a tool for restraining violence. It's for authorizing and rationalizing and justifying. But that doesn't eliminate the emancipatory potential. And that's kind of what I was trying to get at. I think with my answer to your question earlier, that a concept like specially affected states, which is seen as a tool of hegemony, actually has incredible emancipatory potential within it if it's properly understood. If we don't just accept the US and UK understanding of specially affected states and give a much richer one that's much more rooted in ICJ jurisprudence and also in basic logic that really says actually there's a lot of specially affected states out there, and particularly in the use of force, it happens to be the states that are being the objects of force and not simply the ones that are the authors of the force. But we don't have those discussions because that's not widely perceived. And I suppose that's a plug for my own article. But, you know, the emancipatory potential is there, but it takes a lot of skill to mobilize. Again, I also can't remember the last part of your question. Well, that was especially given the momentum now or the last year, you know, talking about. Oh, yeah, sorry. So, I mean, again, I want to give a happier answer, you know, and I don't want to dismiss claims of people who I greatly respect but disagree with who say, you know, you have to start somewhere. You know, let's use creating a truly international tribunal for Ukraine as a stepping stone to creating one that will be able to deal with Western uses of force. You know, number one, it's always, let's make the first step the one that is what the West wants. It's never the first step in Iraq or it's never the first step in even, like, you know, Rwanda and the DRC. It's always the first step that is the enemy of the Western states. Even putting that aside, you know, I just think we have to be a little skeptical if, you know, of the idea that many of the Western states that support an international tribunal are going to be as even-handed when the next time that the US, you know, wrongly invades a country. You know, I'm just cynical enough to think that, yes, it's nice to say that this is going to be a precedent for future international tribunals but I don't think that is the case. And which is why in terms of the nuances of the debate, I've been arguing for, you know, an internationalized tribunal that I find much more likely to be created for other situations than a full-fledged international tribunal that the whole international community has to be behind. And again, I don't have any, you know, belief that my concept or the internationalized concept is somehow some magical, you know, remedy for selectivity in international criminal law. But I do think we have to think about what kinds of institutions are easier to create and more likely to be created politically, economically, etc., you know, in the future. And then I don't think the full-fledged Nuremberg 2.0 is going to be the precedent that its supporters really think that it is. I hope I'm wrong, I really do. Thank you very much, Kevin. Yeah, maybe there is, I think it derives also the discussion about the ICC itself, you know, that's what I meant for, apart from that, from the special, for the potential special tribunal. I think we have one more question, you know, I would like to give the floor to Min, thank you. Hi, can you guys hear me? Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. There's a lot to think about. This is a bit of a departure from the discussion of like armed conflict per se, like physical conflict. But I wanted to ask, because Russia is known to launch cyber attacks, and they've done so in this conflict. So what would kind of constitute the Kremlin progression in the case of cyber warfare? And could you also comment on the sort of challenges to the legal framework with the rise of autonomous weapon systems, the use of AI and warfare, and by extension with it, you know, the difficulties of actually finding the people or the non state group or the state group accountable for what might be crimes? Okay, also complicated. I don't think that there is any reason in principle that a cyber attack couldn't itself be an act of aggression. I haven't, I have to confess, I haven't thought in any kind of systematic way through what that kind of cyber attack would look like. But I certainly think it's possible. And certainly states, you know, states are certainly largely on board with the idea that a cyber attack could be an armed attack within the meaning of the UN Charter, which would give rise to the self defense, and that would be fairly close to an act of aggression. As you said, though, I mean, in terms of cyber attacks, the issue of course is attributability, right? And, you know, it states even that, you know, even when we know a state is behind a particular cyber attack, there's a difference between we know it at a political or international law level and being able to prove it in for terms of state responsibility. So as you know, I think cyber attacks with that are very clearly authored by states will be more part of an armed conflict as opposed to one that would initiate an armed conflict and thereby be possibly an act of aggression, precisely because they're so easy to, not easy, but because of the difficulty that other states have attributing them. Like we all know, you know, where WannaCry came from, but we can't really prove it. So I think, you know, we have to deal with cyber far more than we have. And just as an aside, as a little plug for, you know, the institution that I'm working for these days, you know, the OTP has very, has taken the need to think more about the way that cyber attacks function within the ICC than previously. And there will be at some point next year a new policy paper on cyber attacks. And, you know, the court is very open to that. In terms of autonomous weapons, you know, I mean, this is a really, you know, it's a really difficult issue. It's difficult for me to talk about because I'm much less skeptical of autonomous weapons than most lefty international lawyers are, which I will not bore you with the argument. But I do think that in so far as we believe that autonomous weapons are a danger. And I think from a USAD Bellum standpoint, they really are. I do think it will make it easier for states to go to war because of the fact that they will, you know, force protection and minimizing civilian casualties on the other side. But in so far as we think that they're really a danger under international humanitarian law or international human rights law, it's not going to be easy to regulate them. You know, and if you look at like the Stop Killer Robots campaign or Future of Life or any of these groups, they always talk about, oh, look at the Landmine Convention or look at the biological or chemical weapons conventions. Well, you know, there's a reason why a lot of states are willing to ban biological and chemical weapons because they have essentially no military value at all. You know, unless you're a state that really doesn't care about how many civilians you kill like Assyria, you don't want to use biological or chemical weapons. There's no need to have them in your arsenal, particularly if you're a powerful Western military. Look at the landmines one. I think you and I would probably agree that anti-personnel landmines are a terrible idea or cluster munitions. We can include in this discussion that they have very little military value that they should be banned. I would love to see both of them banned. But that isn't what states believe. States actually find that there is military advantage to landmines and cluster munitions. And so even though most of the world is perfectly happy to ban them, the states that still see them as having military utility and not an easy substitute with another type of weapon, they haven't joined the cluster munitions convention or the landmine ban. So the question is, are autonomous weapons closer to chemical and biological weapons or are they closer to kind of landmines and cluster munitions? And I would argue actually more extreme that they have much more military utility than even the landmines and the cluster munitions, which is going to make it even more difficult to convince not just the rogue states like Russia who don't particularly care, will never care how they're used, but even the states that might want to use them responsibly, how you're going to convince them to give up an autonomous weapon that they see is absolutely critical to their military strategies going forward. I'm very skeptical that you can just say, oh, it's just like the biological chemical weapons because they're going to say, no, they're not. We don't need biological chemical weapons. We need autonomous weapons. So I've been arguing recently that instead of having this big categorical mannequian debate about whether we ban all autonomous weapons or we allow all autonomous weapons, we really try to figure out on a granular level, both now and in the future, what do we think autonomous weapons can do as well as a human soldier or better? And what can't they do? And if we have a granular discussion that focuses on their capabilities and on the capabilities of human soldiers in actual combat situations, maybe there will be a whole range of situations in which even the Russia's, China's, US's, Israel's, UK's, etc. can agree that we should regulate them, not ban them, but say, okay, we won't use them in urban combat until it is absolutely clear that they can discriminate between combatants and civilians as well as a human soldier can. Maybe we'll just limit them to combat at sea or combat in the air where most of the issues that limit the legality of autonomous weapons are not present. But I think we do a disservice by having this mannequian debate where it's, oh, we just have to ban them forever, always in every situation. No state is ever going to buy that with a weapon that has such evident military utility. So I don't know if that was really the question that you were asking, but because these are things I've been thinking a lot about, I think that's probably the best answer that I can give you. Thank you very much, Kevin. And if it's okay, we have a final question. Just before we conclude this wonderful discussion, Maya, you have the floor. Hi. Hi, Kevin. Thanks for your lecture. You can hear me. I look sideways. So I'm from Ukraine, and I've been thinking a lot about our stand in this world dynamic. And I always feel like Ukraine is in this weird boundary between global south and west. We're not in the global south, but we're also not part of the west. We don't have the privileges of the west. And I also feel like the west just sort of we've only been included in this idea of western aligned when we started dying for the western security. Right. And so I'm wondering what you think, maybe not even from an international point of view, but just from a diplomatic point of view of what Ukraine can do in terms of reaching out to global south. I mean, Kulyeba has been like finally opening new embassies in places that we've ignored for a long time like Africa. And that's because, you know, I think a lot of the global south knows anything about Ukraine from the Russian perspective, because we just simply have not been reaching out to the global south at all. And now I think we finally realize that I think it's too late. And we are now being punished for it. And I'm wondering what you think that, you know, Ukraine, Ukrainian leadership can do to now correct this, but also still, you know, we have to kind of do what the West has in many ways now we rely so much on it. So I'm wondering, yeah, what you think in this weird conundrum that Ukraine is in, what we can do. Thanks. I kind of just want to adopt everything that you said and say I agree with you. Because I do. What can I add? Well, I mean, I think the really important part is the diplomatic part, which is the more reaching out to, you know, states that Ukraine might not have had, you know, as long of diplomatic relations with or diplomatic not relations, but ties probably a better term. You know, I do think that, and then I say this with great hesitation, because I'm not Ukrainian and I completely understand, you know, the position of the Ukrainian government that there is to some degree need to moderate their legal demands in a way that makes it easier to build bridges with the South. I mean, the Ukraine, again, I completely understand why they want Nuremberg 2.0. I do not begrudge them in the slightest for wanting a true international tribunal. In a perfect world, they absolutely deserve another Nuremberg, because this is the clearest act of criminal aggression that we've seen since World War II. And I say that, you know, despite the fact that I absolutely believe the invasion of Iraq was the crime of aggression, this is worse. But I think because of the need to maintain their alliances with the West, particularly because it's the West that's providing most of the weaponry that Ukraine needs to defend itself, that they've given a little too much importance to some of what the West wants legally for Ukraine. Again, I understand why Ukraine, I'm not answering this question very well. You know, I understand why Ukraine wants to see Putin in the dock. I think everybody would like to see Putin in the dock. It is not easy to figure out a way to put Putin in the dock. And the way that Ukraine has pursued largely because of the influence of some Western states and some Western international lawyers is, I think, a way that is designed to antagonize states in the South that would be otherwise relatively inclined to support Ukraine in terms of its desire to see aggression punished. I think that's what happened. This obsession with, you know, finding some way to create an international tribunal that can set aside personal immunity when the entire African Union is opposed to that idea is not a good way to build bridges. I think it's a way to ensure that the South just doesn't really engage in these discussions. So I think there has to be some moderation of our kind of maximal ideas for international law, knowing that those ideas are not always shared by the entire world, and that sometimes you have to accept a suboptimal situation, such as creating a tribunal that cannot prosecute Putin while he's in power, you know, in order to build more bridges with states for whom that's a, you know, maybe totally venal. They may be just that they want to protect their own leaders from prosecution, but is still a legal principle that they hold on to with great fervency. You know, it may just be having to accept. Okay, if we want to bring a number of African states on board, we have to accept the fact that the Security Council is the only way to create an international tribunal that can set aside personal immunity and that the General Assembly can only create one, you know, that puts aside functional immunity. I don't know all the answers to that, but that's kind of my best sense that it's a very difficult situation for Ukraine to be in because they have to please the Western states that give them guns. And some of that pleasing makes it more difficult to build the bridges with the South. And I am not a good enough diplomat to know how to thread that needle. I hope that answers your question or some thoughts to your, doesn't answer it, but responds to your question. Thank you, Kevin. I see there is a comment on chat, but I think you actually, that was your main argument. Do you have a, can you read the comment, you know? Which one? The long one at the end? The very last one by Anand. It's pretty much, I think this is your argument basically. And no, there is no other question. Just a couple of seconds to read it through. I think I completely agree with this. Exactly. That was my reading as well, but. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that comment. And I think he put it better in the chat than I've probably put it in my presentation. But yes, I agree. That's a summary of your comment, you know, of your argument. I would say, well, I was very tempted to ask you why you consider this time the aggressive war in Ukraine worse than Iraq, but I'm not going to do that because we're almost over unless you want to. Not so much when I say, I'm glad that you asked me that because let me hear what I mean. When I say worse, I'm not talking about the consequences for people. I mean, the catastrophic effect that the criminal invasion of Iraq has had for the Iraqi people and for the destabilization of the entire Middle East. I'm not saying that that's less than or, you know, what's happened in Ukraine. What I'm saying is I do think, you know, I will go to my grave insisting that the invasion of Iraq was a criminal act of aggression as aggression was defined in customary international law in 2003 when the invasion took place. But there are some nuances to that argument, the Security Council resolutions, et cetera, that makes it tiny bit more legally complicated where there is no complication at all legally in terms of the criminality of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You know, they can invoke all these legal principles that the West has created all they want, but there's no factual basis for them. So that's all I'm saying, that we can denounce the clarity of the invasion of Ukraine as being more obviously criminal than the US's invasion of Iraq, although again, the US invasion of Iraq was absolutely criminal. So thanks for the opportunity to clarify. Thanks for this final comment. Well, on that note, I would like very much to thank you for this wonderful, as I say at the beginning read thought provoking discussion. And the last question by Maya about Ukraine's role or what should Ukraine do now? I think it was very much related, you know, to diplomatic efforts, to more persuasive efforts. And I would say also to more, to why such choices on behalf of the so-called West, because I couldn't agree with you, especially tribunal now just for Ukraine, I don't think that it was a very wise proposition in order to convince states from the global south about the necessity and the Ukrainian and the Russian aggression in Ukraine. So we need a little bit of more ethical leadership and a wiser leadership when they try actually to strengthen this emancipatory role of international law, because I agree with you international law, it's not all accommodates power, but there are some occasions where international law can have its bright side as well, you know, but we need better choices in this regard. So on that note, I would like to thank you once more for your time, for your for accepting. Giving up 90 minutes of their day to listen to me. I know you gave 90 minutes of your day to present, to discuss with us. I would like to thank Liz once more for accommodating this discussion. I would like to thank all of our participants, and I'm looking forward to see you at our next seminar. And Kevin, hopefully we'll see you in person in London. I hope so. It's been too long. Yes, it's been too long. True. Thank you all very, very much. Have a great day. And Kevin, once more, thank you very much for that. Thank you all. Bye-bye. Thank you.