Location Note
1219 International Affairs Building 420 W 118th Street, 12th floor This is a hybrid (in-person/virtual) event. Registration required for attendance. Please note that all attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 Policies and Guidelines. Columbia University is committed to protecting the health and safety of its community. To that end, all visiting alumni and guests must meet the University requirement of full vaccination status in order to attend in-person events. Vaccination cards may be checked upon entry to all venues. All other attendees may participate virtually on Zoom or YouTube.
Please join the Harriman Institute for an event with Azeem Ibrahim (Newlines Institute), Yonah Diamond (Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights), and Christopher Atwood. Moderated by Tanya Domi (Harriman Institute).
An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent
The report by the New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights on Russian breaches of the Genocide Convention is the first to address one of the more contentious and consequential questions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: whether the war is genocidal in nature. With fighting still ongoing, modern tools have made it vital that this question be examined and its truth made known.
With the word genocide so commonly used — and similarly disputed — allowing for a looseness of definition is unhelpful. A clear reckoning of the facts using the opportunities of modern methods of investigation together with legal analysis pursuant to applicable law is essential.
This project was assembled with three teams of experts to assess the subject. This included a team of legal scholars and genocide experts, a second group of open-source intelligence investigators, and linguists who were able to make use of the extensive primary source record this war has already created — of communications intercepts and testimonials.
The Campaign for Reparations for Ukraine
As Russia’s war against Ukraine continues, policymakers around the world have begun to consider the question of reparations. These will be necessary in compensating Ukraine for Russia’s invasion and will be vital in the rebuilding of Ukraine’s economy and society. The Multilateral Action Model, a new report by the New Lines Institute on Reparations provides a legal process for the collection and distribution of reparations. It is an answer to that previously unresolved question.
The model breaks new ground. It has to, because the war of aggression it is intended to compensate is unlike any other in Europe since 1945. With Russia a member of the United Nations Security Council, a traditional model of reparations ordered by the U.N. would not pass the Russian U.N. veto. Instead, a new solution has to be devised.
The New Lines Institute convened a team of international legal experts, economists, and scholars to devise a new means of reparations. Reparations for Ukraine will be part of the discussion with our panelists.
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, and a Director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, after which he completed fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. Dr. Ibrahim is the author of the seminal books: “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2016), “Radical Origins: Why We Are Losing the War Against Islamic Extremism” (Pegasus, 2017) and “Authoritarian Century: Omens of a Post-Liberal Future” (Hurst, 2022). He is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and has written hundreds of pieces for publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph (UK), the (London) Times, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, Newsweek, The National Interest, Yale Global, and many others. Outside academia, Dr. Ibrahim has been a reservist in the IV Battalion Parachute Regiment (the UK’s elite airborne infantry reserve) and a multi-award-winning entrepreneur. He was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2019 he received the International Association of Genocide Scholars Award for his research on the Rohingya genocide; and in 2022, Dr Ibrahim was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, for his services to foreign policy.
Yonah Diamond is an international human rights lawyer at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and principal author of the Wallenberg-New Lines expert report, An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent. He is also lead author of An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention (2021) and co-author of Cameroon’s Unfolding Catastrophe: Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes Against Humanity (2019). He has lectured at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and the European Parliament’s Sakharov Fellowship Programme, and published articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Project Syndicate, Foreign Policy, Globe and Mail, Just Security, and Opinio Juris, among others.
Christopher Atwood is an advocacy fellow with Razom for Ukraine and a graduate student at Columbia University, specializing in perceptions of identity and colonial violence in Eastern Europe. Prior to joining Razom, he served as a contributor and advisor on the independent report, An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent. Additionally, Christopher serves as a senior advisor on media and communications at the Soupilnist Foundation, a journalism NGO based in Kyiv. His current research project concerns the pattern of Russian violence in contemporary Ukraine.
