#WeDontRideCamels

I am in the process of exploring the Arab versions of well-known 'Western' websites & platforms.   
Souq.com is the Middle East's version of Amazon established in 2005. [Souq means market]

My favourite is Zoomaal. Zoomaal is a crowdfunding platform in the Arab world (like Kickstarter) - with an emphasis on artistic projects.

This is Zoomaal's twitter handle. Their motto is 'We Don't Ride Camels' pointing out that Arabs are creative too. I concur. 

A little bit of creativity on the side, please

For a couple of months now I teach international human rights law in Doha. Although it is a course offered by the school of law, my students have many different educational backgrounds - from science and computer science to international affairs and law. This fact gives a challenging aspect to the course because on one hand you have to teach trained lawyers and at the same time you need to introduce  the basics to students who have no legal background. Someone would think that the level of the course is lower than expected which is only half-way through to the truth. 

Now that we are in the 10th week of the course and students are already familiar with the basic concepts and structure of international human rights law, I witness an unprecedented creativity on behalf of many of the students. The fact that they are 'outsiders' and they are not familiar with international law generally (this applies to lawyers too) puts them in a unique position. If you judge and assess this creativity according to typical (technical) standards only (i.e. is this the correct answer to my question?) it means that you are naive - at least in my view. Students have an extraordinary way to perceive the knowledge you are trying to convey to them and their questions reflect this. 

The other day I was trying to explain that an international court provides for a remedy to victims when a given human right is violated. I gave some examples of the concept of remedy, like financial compensation etc., and then I asked if this was clear to them. A student raised her hand and said 'so, this is a way to give the human right back to the victim, correct?'. A trained lawyer would think that this is a silly thing to say and that you can never 'give the right back'. However, her comment left me speechless for a moment. It took me some seconds to realise that one could not come up with a simpler and more accurate way to explain the meaning of remedy. 

Some days ago the students had for an assignment to identify positive and negative points of an international treaty on human rights. I gave to one of my students a 9/10 mark even though overall the content of the assignment was average. This is because he thought, wrote and suggested something that even lawyers would not think easily. He was criticising a specific provision of the treaty and he found natural to suggest that the various rights included in this provision should be broken down into two separate provisions, which by the way it was a very good suggestion. However, besides it being a good suggestion, it is not easy for anyone to re-arrange a given structure, which is the essence of creativity.

If you are not very careful, you can easily oversee this row, amorphous (yet) creativity. I, in my turn, there is not much I can do but keep challenging them and help them unfold their creativity on all levels. This is the video we watched couple of weeks ago :)

The 12 mile rule

The 12 mile rule comes from the law of the sea and it concerns the question of the breadth of territorial sea that coastal States are entitled. After considerable debate among States, it was only in the '80's-'90's that consensus was reached and States agreed that, in principle, the maximum of territorial sea that they can claim is 12 nautical miles. This rule is rather technical and to be honest I am not very fond of the law of the sea. What I find interesting however is the background story to the 12 mile rule. 

In 1609 Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist who is regarded toady as the father of contemporary International Law, published the book Mare Liberum (The Free Sea or the Freedom of the Sea). In Mare Liberum Hugo Grotius argued for and formulated a new principle: the sea is international territory and every nation had the right to use it. Although this is a well-known fact - especially to international lawyers - many people are not aware that Mare Liberum was written on a commission (in fact most masterpieces in art were written or painted on a commission). The full title of Grotius' treatise was 'The Freedom of the Seas or The Right which Belongs to the Dutch to take part in the East Indian Trade'. Grotius was a legal counsel to the Dutch East India Company which at that moment was trying to object Portugal's claims on holding exclusive rights to trade with East India and exercise navigation rights. Therefore, Grotius came with his dissertation to refute these claims. Leaving aside the not that altruistic motives of Grotius and the Dutch East India Company, the fact remains that Grotius' work established an unprecedented principle - even according to today's standards: the Sea was an international public good, the common property of all and the private property of none. 

Coming back to the 12 mile rule now, it officially sealed a shift in Grotius' approach. The Sea is now divided and fragmented into zones by using precise mathematical instruments. Most part of the Sea is now seen as part of the territory of individual States or as zones where they can exercise aspects of their jurisdiction. Now-days you get lengthy judgments by international courts in which technical experts use their rulers and dividers to delimit zones and slice the Sea into pieces. The need for technical standards and for establishing our authority over the last piece of land or the last drop of the sea replaced vision. Bureaucracy took over our imagination and the principle that the Sea belongs to everybody and nobody.       

Needless to say that this blog has nothing to do with the Law of the Sea. Yet it has something to do with International Law and other stuff.