Swiss Moot Court 2025/2026

The modern law of state responsibility for breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL) rests on a foundation built across the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Lieber Code and Hague Conventions to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols. The International Law Commission's 2001 Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts codified core principles: attribution of conduct to states, the obligation of cessation and reparation, and the consequences of serious breaches of peremptory norms. In parallel, individual criminal accountability evolved through the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court. The core dispute today centers on the interplay between state responsibility and individual criminal liability, and on how IHL applies to contemporary armed conflicts involving occupation, annexation, and protracted territorial disputes. Cases such as the ICJ's advisory opinions on the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004) and on Israel's policies and practices (2024), the Bosnia Genocide judgment (2007), and pending proceedings concerning Ukraine and Gaza have sharpened questions about effective control, complicity, the duty to prevent, and obligations erga omnes. Territorial issues — illegal annexation, prolonged occupation, and forcible transfer of populations — raise both jus ad bellum and jus in bello concerns simultaneously. The issue stands at a moment of significant doctrinal stress. Enforcement remains fragmented across the ICJ, ICC, regional courts, universal-jurisdiction prosecutions, and UN-mandated investigative mechanisms. Debates persist over reparations regimes (such as the UN Register of Damage for Ukraine), the legal effects of non-recognition of unlawful territorial acquisitions, and whether existing frameworks can address asymmetric warfare, autonomous weapons, and cyber operations consistent with IHL.

The Syrian conflict began in March 2011 with protests against the Assad government during the Arab Spring and escalated into a multi-sided war involving government forces, a fragmented opposition, Kurdish-led forces, ISIL, and foreign powers including Russia, Iran, Türkiye, and the United States-led coalition. Documented violations include the use of chemical weapons (notably Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Shaykhun in 2017), systematic torture in detention (the Caesar files), siege warfare, indiscriminate attacks on civilians and hospitals, enforced disappearances, and sexual violence. ISIL committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the Yazidi community and others. Accountability has advanced through unconventional channels because Security Council referral to the ICC was vetoed in 2014 by Russia and China. The UN Commission of Inquiry (2011), the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM, 2016), and the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team have built evidentiary archives. Universal-jurisdiction prosecutions in Germany (notably the Koblenz Al-Khatib trial), France, Sweden, and the Netherlands have convicted former Syrian officials. In 2023, the ICJ ordered provisional measures against Syria under the Convention against Torture in a case brought by the Netherlands and Canada. In 2023 the General Assembly established an Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria. The political landscape shifted dramatically with the fall of the Assad government in December 2024 and the establishment of a transitional administration in Damascus. This has opened new possibilities for domestic accountability, archival access, and victim participation, but also raised concerns about selective justice, amnesties, the status of foreign fighters and former regime officials, and the relationship between transitional justice and reconstruction. The committee must weigh how international and hybrid mechanisms can complement Syrian-led processes consistent with the rights of victims.

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) codified the regime of the continental shelf, the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, and the procedure for claims to the extended continental shelf beyond 200 nm through submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS). UNCLOS also established obligations on conservation and management of living resources and dispute-settlement mechanisms through ITLOS, the ICJ, and Annex VII arbitration. Landmark cases — North Sea Continental Shelf (1969), the 2016 South China Sea arbitration, Somalia v. Kenya (2021), and the 2024 ITLOS advisory opinion on climate change — have progressively clarified delimitation principles, historic-rights claims, and states' due-diligence duties. The core disputes today fall into two overlapping clusters. First, overlapping continental shelf and maritime boundary claims persist across the South China Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean (Greece-Türkiye-Cyprus-Libya), the Arctic (Russia, Canada, Denmark and others have filed competing CLCS submissions over the Lomonosov Ridge), and the Aegean. Second, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing — much of it associated with distant-water fleets — depletes stocks in West Africa, the Southwest Atlantic, and the Pacific, while seabed mining, hydrocarbon exploration, and the 2023 BBNJ Agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction add new layers of contestation over resource exploitation. The issue stands at a juncture where rising demand for energy, minerals, and protein collides with climate-driven shifts in fish stocks and sea-level rise that may affect baselines and maritime entitlements. States disagree on the legal weight of historic claims, the role of equity in delimitation, the enforceability of arbitral awards against non-complying parties, and how to operationalize port-state and flag-state duties under the FAO Port State Measures Agreement. The committee must address how international law can manage these compounding pressures without triggering escalation.