Speaking
Lectures, panels and conference presentations, 2014–2024. Where a recording or an organiser's record survives it is linked; where the delivered paper, the lecture outline or the slides survive, the entry carries an account of the argument. The rest are listed as they stand.
- Engagements
- 21
- With a public record
- 4
- Summarised from source
- 10
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The International Criminal Court: Building a More Just World
Department of Law, North South University, Dhaka
A seminar for students on what the International Criminal Court is and how it works in practice, covering the Court’s structure, its procedural mechanisms and the enforcement of its rulings.
The framing was deliberate. Students meet international criminal law as doctrine and case law, and rarely as an institution with a registry, a defence bar, a victims’ section and an enforcement problem. A court that cannot execute its own arrest warrants is a different object from the one the textbooks describe, and understanding the difference is most of what distinguishes a useful question from a naive one.
Reported in The Daily Star, The Financial Express, Ajker Patrika
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The work of the International Criminal Court
School of Law, BRAC University, Dhaka
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Inside the Courtroom: Advancing International Justice through Diverse Roles of Parties
ICC Sixth Asia-Pacific Forum, International Criminal Court, The Hague
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Bangladesh and the Right to Self-determination: The Decades Following 1971
NSU Law Conference: Law in the Contemporary World, North South University, Dhaka
Article 25(c) of the Constitution commits the state to ‘support oppressed peoples throughout the world waging a just struggle against imperialism, colonialism or racialism’. Few constitutions say anything of the kind, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman justified it before the General Assembly in 1974 on the ground that the struggle of Bangladesh symbolised the universal struggle for peace and justice, so it was natural that the country should stand by the oppressed.
The paper asks what that commitment has amounted to in the five decades since. A state born of a self-determination claim carries an unusual burden when the claims of others reach it, and the record of how Bangladesh has answered them is the test of whether article 25(c) is a principle or a preamble.
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The International Criminal Court: What it is, what it does, and who works there?
NSU Law Webinar Series, Department of Law, North South University
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Careers Beyond Borders
United Nations Student Association Maastricht, United Nations University (UNU-MERIT), Maastricht
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Development of International Criminal Justice Institutions: From Nuremberg, Tokyo Tribunal to the ICC
4th Online Certificate Course on Genocide and Justice, Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum, Dhaka
The lecture starts earlier than most accounts of international criminal justice do, with the First World War rather than the Second.
Articles 227 to 230 of the Treaty of Versailles provided for the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm II, of persons accused of violating the laws and customs of war, and of those guilty of criminal acts against Allied nationals. What followed was the Leipzig trials, which is to say very little. That failure is the point of beginning there: it establishes that the question of whether individuals can be tried for acts of state was asked and abandoned a generation before Nuremberg answered it.
The lecture then traces the line from Nuremberg and Tokyo through the ad hoc tribunals to a permanent court, treating each institution as a response to what its predecessor could not do.
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Dialogue on the Official Secrets Act and Its Implications
Law & Justice Network, Youth Policy Forum, Bangladesh
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Legal Implications of the Rohingya Crisis
YPF-Harvard Dialogue: International Inaction over the Rohingya Crisis, Youth Policy Forum, Bangladesh
A map of the international legal proceedings and mechanisms bearing on the Rohingya, and an argument about how they interact.
The presentation defines the objective before surveying the machinery, which is the move that makes the survey useful. Justice for the Rohingya means two things: accountability for the atrocities committed against them over many years, and the safe, dignified and voluntary return of the Rohingya to their homes and lands in Rakhine. Proceedings that serve one do not automatically serve the other.
Read against that definition, the separate tracks stop looking like duplication and start looking like a division of labour with gaps in it, which is where the presentation’s observations about how they affect one another do their work.
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Working at the International Criminal Court
Department of Law, North South University
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Representing Victims Before the International Criminal Court: The Office of Public Counsel for Victims
Notre Dame University Law Club, Notre Dame University, Dhaka
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Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019
Edward M. Kennedy Center for Public Service and the Arts, Dhaka
A panel on King’s life and work, convened by the EMK Center to mark the day, alongside Barrister Jyotirmoy Barua of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.
The discussion ran along three lines: the influence of Gandhian philosophy on King’s thinking and method, the intersection between the American civil rights movement and postcolonial struggles for equality in this part of the world, and what his work still asks of the twenty-first century.
The second of those is the one worth a Dhaka audience’s attention. Civil rights movements are usually taught as national stories, and the traffic of ideas between them, in both directions, is the part that gets lost.
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Delimitation of Maritime Zones and Boundaries
Department of Law, North South University
A working lecture on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, taken zone by zone from the text rather than from a summary of it.
It opens where the Convention does, with Tommy Koh’s description of it as ‘a constitution for the oceans’, and with the principle that does most of the work in every dispute that follows: the land dominates the sea. Entitlement at sea is generated by coasts, so the whole apparatus rests on where the baselines run.
From there it works through the territorial sea and article 3’s twelve-mile limit, the rules for normal and straight baselines, and outward through the zones each baseline generates. Students who have only met the law of the sea through case names generally have not seen how much of an outcome is fixed before any tribunal is involved, by the drawing of a line along a coast.
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Privacy and Data Security
Telecom Reporter's Network Bangladesh (TRNB), Dhaka
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Recognising State-Effectuated Refugee Outflows as Transboundary Harm
1st Senior Advocate Ozair Farooq Memorial Law Conference, Faculty of Law, University of Dhaka, Dhaka
Whether generating a refugee outflow is itself unlawful has never been settled, and arguments for state responsibility usually die at that question. The paper delivered here goes around it.
Instead of asking whether the originating act was illegal, it asks who bears its cost, and characterises a state-generated refugee outflow as transboundary harm. That characterisation attaches an established body of law under which a state whose activities cause significant harm across a border owes compensation to the affected state, without the claimant having to establish wrongfulness in the conduct that started it.
Myanmar and Bangladesh are the worked illustration. The full paper is listed under Publications.
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Workshop on International Mooting
School of Law, BRAC University, Dhaka
A three-day training workshop, 19 to 21 July 2018, designed and led for an intake of more than fifty students.
It taught mooting as a sequence rather than as a performance. The first stage was research: breaking a compromis into its constituent facts and law, reading it enough times to hold the sequence of events in mind, then dividing the issues across a team of four so that both sides are built at once and jurisdiction is settled before anything else. Around that sat the practical apparatus a student rarely gets taught, which databases to use, how the sources of international law rank against one another, why case law from different jurisdictions carries different weight, and how to compile the results so they can be found again under pressure.
The second stage was memorial drafting, and the third was oral advocacy. The advocacy material is the part that reads least like a syllabus: know the law well, treat not knowing an answer as ordinary rather than fatal, never deliver a speech from memory, and be specific. The supporting apparatus was equally concrete, a compromis, the memorial, a flow chart of the argument, the laws and cases, sticky notes, two separate files.
The three stages are the shape a moot actually takes, and the workshop was built so that a student who had never mooted could see the whole of it before committing to one.
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The Creation of Bangladesh: Remedial Secession or Fait Accompli?
Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Conference 2018, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Bangladesh is the only territory outside the colonial framework to have seceded successfully from a state in the post-decolonisation era, and international lawyers have never comfortably classified it.
Two readings compete. On the first, 1971 is the single successful exercise of external self-determination by a non-self-governing people after decolonisation. On the second, it was a fait accompli of the India-Pakistan war of that December, and the law arrived afterwards to describe what force had settled.
The paper sets out the case each reading can make across self-determination, secession, statehood, territorial integrity, the use of force and humanitarian intervention. Its TWAIL argument is that the two readings track a division between European and non-European accounts, so the disagreement is about who narrates statehood as much as about doctrine. The full paper is listed under Publications.
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It's Not Her Fault
Voice for Change, Dhaka
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The Right of Self-determination and Secession in Contemporary International Law
Department of Law, North South University
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Science, Technology, Security: Challenges to global governance
UCL Global Governance Institute, London
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Legal Awareness Building
School of Law, BRAC University, with the Rotary Club of Dhaka South, Dhaka
A seminar talk on why legal awareness matters, given to mark Youth Service Month.
Its argument starts from where law comes from. Rules are formed out of two things, past custom and the necessities of the future, and social belief shapes them while they are being made. Once settled, though, the law takes priority over the custom that produced it, and it is the law rather than the custom that then dictates what people may do. A population that does not know the law is therefore governed by something it cannot see.
That is the case for awareness programmes: they are the most effective mechanism for informing people of an issue and for shifting perceptions of what is socially acceptable.
Reported in The Daily Star