LCIL Seminar: 'Rebel Rule of Law'

Venue: The Finley Library, LCIL
Time: 11.30am

In practicality all armed conflicts in which they are involved, non-state armed groups detain individuals suspected of having committed some type of crime. It is not rare for armed groups to establish their own courts to judge these individuals, applying a widely variable range of rules of local, national, transnational, and international origins. Are these trials simply illegal abuses of power, or does international law open a space in which rebels can claim ownership of their share of the rule of law?

René Provost holds a Bachelor of Laws from the Université de Montréal, a Master of Laws from the University of California at Berkeley, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He served as law clerk to the Honourable Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada in 1989-1990, and taught international law at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in 1991. He joined the Faculty of Law of McGill University in 1994, first as a Boulton Fellow (1994-1995), then as Assistant Professor (1995-2001) Associate Professor (2001-2015), and Full Professor (from 2015). He was the Associate Dean (Academic) of the Faculty of Law from 2001 to 2003. From 2005 to 2010 he was the founding Director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. Professor Provost teaches Public International Law, International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, International Environmental Law, Legal Anthropology, and various courses in legal theory. He is the author of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002), the editor of State Responsibility in International Law (Ashgate-Dartmouth, 2002), Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging: Religion and Multiculturalism from Israel to Canada (Oxford University Press, 2015), Culture in the Domains of Law (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2016), and co-editor of International Law Chiefly as Applied and Interpreted in Canada, 7t Ed. (Emond Montgomery, 2014), Confronting Genocide (Springer Verlag, 2011), Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (Springer Verlag, 2013). He was the president of the Société québécoise de droit international from 2002 to 2006. In 2015, he was named a Fellow by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation for his contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities.

This event is open to LCIL fellows, visiting fellows & scholars, researchers, and Law students.