Asser Institute

Accurate aerosol prediction remains challenging due to uncertainties in atmospheric composition arising from imperfect initial conditions, errors in emission inventories, and our limited understanding of aerosol processes and properties interacting with atmospheric variables. Due to their short lifetime and strong spatial/temporal variability, global observations of aerosols and clouds rely heavily on satellite remote sensing. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has recently developed the atmospheric Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS-A; Skamarock et al. 2012) coupled with the next-generation Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport model (GOCART-2G; Collow et al. 2024) and interfaced with the Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration (JEDI) system. This integrated framework enables online-coupled data assimilation of multi-sensor, hyperspectral satellite aerosol retrievals and all-sky radiances across a wide spectral range within a unified atmosphere-aerosol analysis and forecasting system. This talk introduces the new MPAS-GOCART2G-JEDI system, with an emphasis on the assimilation of NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) retrievals and their systematic evaluation against legacy AOD products such as MODIS, VIIRS, and AERONET.

Caster Semenya was wronged, and Switzerland – due to the inaction of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (SFSC) – was held responsible by the Grand Chamber (GC) of the ECtHR. This conclusion to a long judicial marathon is an important vindication for an athlete who saw her career destroyed by a process that violated her right to a fair hearing. The case will be remembered as a significant landmark that will affect the field of transnational sports law and governance for years to come.

Abstract This piece outlines the engagement of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights with the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on business and human rights in light of the Advisory Opinion requested by Mexico on the obligations of the firearms industry. It outlines how the Court has relied on the distinction between positive and negative human rights duties, which has led it to constantly find states responsible for omissions (failing to ensure rights) instead of actions (carried out by private actors, including corporations). For the Court, such a distinction translates into the possibility that corporations can violate human rights directly.

This Chapter investigates the principal challenges to the rule of law and human rights that have emerged during the United Kingdom’s criminal justice response to foreign fighters. The vast scope of the United Kingdom’s definition of terrorism in Terrorism Act 2000Terrorism Act 2000 section 1 ensures that the activities of foreign fighters are captured through the prism of counter-terrorism law but achieves this aim at the expense of the rule of law, in particular the principle of legalityPrinciple of legality. The Chapter explores the numerous legal avenues to prosecute foreign fighters through the existing legislative framework of the Terrorism Acts, analysing the strengths and weaknesses of UK law in addressing the foreign fighter phenomenon through the lens of counter-terrorism. In this context, it assesses impact of the UK definition of terrorism on the legal response to foreign fighters and its applicability to armed conflict, through an in-depth analysis of recent developments in the case law. Particular attention is given to the adoption of the ‘Designated Area Offence’, a controversial legal regime with flawed mens reaMens rea requirements as well as issues regarding international cooperation in the case of Kotey and El Sheikh which revolved around the risk of being subjected to the death penalty. Finally, the Chapter explores the international (human rights) law implications of the targeting of British foreign fighters through airstrikes by Coalition forces.

In recent years, numerous European states have resorted to citizenship deprivation to tackle the security threat posed by foreign fighters. This Chapter analyses the rule of law and human rights impact of the deprivation of citizenship of foreign fighters in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. In the context of the United Kingdom, the Chapter examines the consistency of the UK’s legal regime with international legal obligations on the reduction of statelessness as well as the role of judicial deference to the executive, zooming in on recent jurisprudential developments that were brought to the fore by the landmark case of Shamima Begum. In addition, the Chapter unpacks the set of administrative measures specifically aimed at foreign fighters that were introduced by the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, in particular ‘Temporary Exclusion Orders’. Furthermore, the Chapter assesses whether the practice of depriving foreign fighters of their citizenship violates the ECHR and the European Convention on Nationality, examining the ramifications of the citizenship deprivation of foreign fighters on the international legal orderInternational legal order and international relations. Beside interfering with human rights, citizenship deprivation of foreign fighters contravenes international obligations to bring terrorists to justice, first and foremost those deriving from the international legal regime on foreign fighters, including UN Security Council Resolution 2178. The Chapter concludes that the metamorphosis of citizenship deprivation from an obscure tool of totalitarian regimes to one of the flagship counter-terrorism policies of liberal democracies is disconcerting from the perspective of the rule of law and human rights.

Abstract Regional International Organizations (rio s) are an important part of the modern international legal landscape. Yet, thus far, they have largely remained at the margins of scholarly attention. This contribution argues that, inter alia, the rio s’ lens provides valuable insights since rio s’ law casts in legal terms regional narratives of emancipation and solidarity that are central to bringing into existence and sustaining the legitimacy of new regional (legal) orders. The article then proceeds to trace the development of the principle of solidarity in international law and in the legal orders of two rio s, namely the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) with a view to providing concrete examples of the potential and limits of rio s to act as vehicles for realising regional narratives of solidarity. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of taking regional (legal) space seriously by highlighting the potential of rio s’ law to increase accountability and pluralise the geographies of international law.

Abstract The pivotal contributions of private international law to the conceptual emergence of international human rights law have been largely ignored. Using the idea of adjacent possibility as a theoretical metaphor, this article shows that conflict of laws analysis and technique enabled the articulation of human rights universalism. The nineteenth-century epistemic practice of private international law was a key arena where the claims of individuals were incrementally cast as being spatially independent from their state of nationality before rights universalism became mainstream. Conflict of laws was thus a vital combinatorial ingredient contributing to the dislocation of rights from territory that underwrites international human rights today.

Literature on autonomous weapon systems (AWS) make frequent reference to measures of performance (MoP) like accuracy, reliability or robustness, often to make normative statements (e.g. regarding the prohibition on indiscriminate weapons). How users of AWS are expected to interpret and use such MoPs, however, is rarely addressed. This is problematic as many indicators, such as accuracy, are measured very differently for AI systems compared to conventional weapons. This chapter explores in depth four MoPs specific to AI—accuracy, robustness, reliability and understandability—that are crucial to consider when making legal decisions concerning the deployment of AWS. For accuracy, a warning is issued to not take the metric at face value, but instead to decompose the metric into Recall and Specificity, representing an AWS’s military utility and ability to discriminate respectively. The importance of understandability from a legal and practical perspective is also highlighted, and juxtaposed to modern AI models which often feature a degree of opacity. For MoPs in general, the chapter concludes that this is an element of Technical Awareness that is largely out of a field commander’s hands: instead, responsibility lies with the Providing Entity to engage in careful and effective development and testing to ensure legal and operational benchmarks are upheld. At the same time, end-users of AWS retain important supporting roles, e.g. by providing diligent reports after use to improve robustness and reliabillity predictions of systems.

The coming of age of the EU as a global actor and the proliferation of its activities on the international plane entail that its courts are increasingly faced with complex and politically laden questions pertaining to territorial entities whose international legal status is far from clear. The EU's engagement with Kosovo is a salient example. Due to strong opposition by some Member States, the EU has not recognized Kosovo as an independent State, but it has developed a policy of engagement therewith. However, this pragmatic approach does not resolve the underlying political tensions and legal questions arising from the EU's dealings with non-recognized territorial entities, as Case C-632/20 P Spain v. Commission (Kosovo) attests to. The judgment is significant: (a) for the EU's growing engagement with non-recognized territorial entities since it clarifies the meaning of the concept of ‘third country’ and confirms that such entities may participate in EU agencies; (b) for the EU's engagement with Kosovo – particularly in the light of Kosovo's 2022 bid for EU membership; and (c) more broadly, for answering institutional questions pertaining to third-country participation in EU agencies.