Professor Ben Saul

Ben Saul is Professor of International Law and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney. Ben has expertise on global counter-terrorism law, human rights, the law of war, and international crime, refugees, the Asia-Pacific and Antarctica. Ben has taught law at Oxford, the Hague Academy of International Law and in China, India, Nepal and Cambodia, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Ben practises as a barrister in international and national courts and was lead counsel in four successful security cases against Australia before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, including Hicks (2016), Leghaei (2015), FKAG (2013) and MMM (2013). He has worked with United Nations bodies (including UNODC, UNESCO, and UNHCR), governments and NGOs, delivered foreign aid projects, and often appears in the media.

presents

Human Rights and Ungoverned Spaces: What Do “Terrorists” Make of “Law”?

What do “terrorists” think of law and justice, including human rights and the law of war? This lecture explores this question based on field interviews with “terrorist” groups from Asia to the Middle East, including communist insurgents, rebels in civil war, national liberation fighters, and religious fighters. This question is often not asked, or its answers are obscured, because after 9/11 the world simply outlawed terrorists. Terrorists are often seen as outside reason and legality, and never to be negotiated with. If terrorists are evil monsters, they have taken themselves outside the rule of law and into a pre-modern state of nature, where horrifying violence is the only law and the rule of the gun prevails. In turn, our law responds by out-casting terrorists and offering them only stigmatisation and the harshest punishment – and even death – as moral deviants.

This lecture explores the attitudes and practices of groups labelled as “terrorist” towards international and national law. It also examines how these groups produce and enforce their own “laws” and “legal” institutions, from military rules about war fighting and the treatment of civilians, to “administrative” regulations about taxation and governance, to “civil” laws about personal and property disputes, to institutional ideas about dispute settlement, remedies, and punishment. A better understanding of what terrorists think of law, and how they use it, can improve counter-terrorism. Why do some groups violate humanitarian norms more than others? What factors pull terrorist groups closer towards respecting human rights, and what factors push them away? Are there ways that the international community can constructively engage with some groups to socialise them into behaving better? What are the limits of such engagement? Are some groups, such as the “Islamic State”, so beyond the pale that all we can do is kill them?

This research is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.