Call for Submissions: BYBIL Symposium on "The Iraq Inquiry Report"

The British Yearbook of International Law has issued a call for submissions for a symposium on "The Iraq Inquiry Report," which will be featured in its 2016 volume. Here's the call:

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SYMPOSIUM

The Iraq Inquiry Report

The 2016 volume of the British Yearbook of International Law will feature a symposium examining the systemic issues that arise from the Iraq Inquiry Report on questions of international law, government and military decision-making, responsibility and accountability and the conduct of British foreign relations. By way of example, potential lines of inquiry could include (but are not limited to) an examination of

• the implications of the Report’s findings for the legality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq;
• the consequences/effect of the absence of direct consideration of international law in the Report (what does this tell us (if anything) about the role of domestic inquiries and of international law?);
• the differences between the Report and reports prepared in other states dealing with some or all of the same issues, possibly including reflection on the disparate treatment of public international law;
• the ways in which ‘state intelligence’ is handled by both those charged with making a decision on whether to deploy armed forces and by the authors of the Report itself;
• the relationship between policy and law evinced by the Inquiry and the Report;
• how decisions were made in the lead up to the final decision to deploy armed forces in Iraq – what lessons can be drawn for decisionmaking processes and foreign policy?
• how international lawyers – scholars, judges, practitioners and legal advisers – should approach questions of state decision-making in light of the Report, and the potential implications for analysing state practice in international law;
• whether the inquiry process has achieved some form of ‘responsibility’: what is the likely effect of the Report in securing responsibility and accountability? (Both concepts to be broadly defined.) What does the Inquiry process/Report tell us about how a state deals with the fact that it may have breached international law? Does the domestic inquiry process help to secure accountability, or does it obscure/diffuse it?
• the dynamic between the focus on specific individuals in the Report (and the public perception that such individuals should be held accountable) and the notion of state – i.e. collective – responsibility?

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Abstracts of 500–1000 words are to be sent to the Assistant Editors at BritishYearbookIL@gmail.com by 17:00 GMT on 9 December 2016.

Authors considering a submission are encouraged to contact the Editors-in-Chief:

Professor Catherine Redgwell
catherine.redgwell@law.ox.ac.uk and
Professor Eyal Benvenisti
eb653@cam.ac.uk

or the Assistant Editors:
BritishYearbookIL@gmail.com
informally to discuss the scope of their submission.

The Editorial Team will conduct an initial review of abstracts and advise authors of their decisions by the end of January 2017.

Full papers will then be due by 1 June 2017, via the ScholarOne system, with the final decision of publication made after an editorial review. Full papers should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words (inclusive of footnotes), in the style preferred by the Yearbook.

Full papers will be released online under the Advance Access scheme once editing is complete, and the hard copy volume will appear in 2017.