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Friday, 8 November 2019 - 1.00pm
Location: 
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Finley Library

Lecture summary: States and other political communities have engaged in extraterritorial (or extra-communal) violent acts to reign over their people abroad since the Greeks started the Troyan wars to recapture Helena and probably, of course, even before those times. Instead of engaging in war against host states, contemporary authoritarian practices are more targeted. They take place in what David Lewis has termed “transnational illiberal spaces”; spaces occupied by diasporic and exiled communities. In these spaces, offshore repression directly zooms in on expatriate dissidents. In her research on extraterritorial authoritarian practices, Marlies Glasius charts the exercise of state power beyond territory, including (digital) spying and retaliation or threats thereof against family members at home, abduction and other illegal means to secure forceful return to the homeland, or, most violently, extraterritorial assassinations. While the Trotski liquidation and the Letelier bombing evince the omnipresence of examples of the latter throughout history, recent cases of attempted or successful assassination with alleged foreign state involvement, including Litvinenko, Skripal, and Khasjoggi seem to illustrate that the practice is becoming more pervasive, or at least, less clandestine. This lecture signals how international law may, inadvertently but structurally, facilitate extraterritorial repressive practices, for instance through consular and diplomatic immunity law as well as mutual legal assistance and extradition arrangements. 

 

Larissa van den Herik is Vice Dean of Leiden Law School and Professor of International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. She is currently involved in a book project with Frédéric Mégret for CUP on Aliens, Diasporas and International Law. On this topic, also see: https://esil-sedi.eu/esil-reflection-diasporas-and-international-law/

 

The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press

 

A sandwich lunch is available for all attendees from 12.30 pm in the Old Library.

 

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice.

 

Lauterpacht Centre for International Law

 

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