Thank you, Can. Since 1997, the Supreme Court has taken the approach that where domestic law is silent, international law should fill the lacuna. In constitutional cases, we argue international law. We argue comparative law. But what I have found is that it is constitutional law that mostly occupies the field. One of the cases I argued along with other counsel in 2005 is still the definitive case on online free speech regarding the striking down of a provision of the Information Technology Act that governs the internet. The actual words of the law are quite intriguing—any language that was online, defined as a text message or something on a website, that was annoying or inconvenient “could lead to a three-year prison sentence.”

Welcome, everybody, to the American Society of International Law's annual meeting. it is my pleasure to welcome you to this very special panel on Black women, global human rights, and policing. My name is Michele Bratcher Goodwin. I am the host of “On the Issues with Michele Goodwin” at Ms. magazine and the executive producer of Ms. Studios. I am also a chancellor's professor at the University of California Irvine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

Thank you so much for having me and the opportunity to have this really important discussion with amazing women from around the world.

Thank you for the introduction, Michele, and, Karen, I really appreciated your remarks.

I can feel what India was saying. I have a personal experience of it. I was in Sédhiou in 2016. I was with a group of friends, and we were at the festival. the festival was really white-centric, even though we were in Senegal. It was three in the morning. I was walking. I was in a short skirt. I was the only dark Black woman. I was picked up by the police, and when I answered to the police officer in Wolof, he told me the only reason I could be hanging there with white people is because I am a prostitute, and for that, I was taken into custody. When I was sharing that story with a lot of Black women and mostly with a lot of dark-skinned women in Senegal, it was not unique. Most of us were just target on the street because the police officer felt that we must be a prostitute, dressing a certain way.

Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation. This is a very difficult topic for me. I want to say that Brazil has the most violent police in the world, killing around 6,000 people every year. A lot of them are children.

Good afternoon. I am Monica Hakimi. I am from the University of Michigan Law School, and it is my pleasure to moderate this panel on the recent invasion in Ukraine. The invasion has caused me, as I suspect it has caused many of you, a great deal of horror, sadness, and fear. We hope to spend the hour today interrogating the question of what the invasion means for jus ad bellum, in particular, and for the international legal order more generally.

Thank you, Monica. While the cases you mentioned or previous examples have involved uses of force where maybe not all observers felt that the black letter law on when use of force was permissible was satisfied, I do think that the current case is extremely distinguishable. When it came to both Kosovo and Iraq, there was agreement in international institutions that, for Kosovo, there was a grave humanitarian situation. For Iraq, that there was a certain threat emanating from Iraq. I think those international institutions supported addressing those situations one way or another, as evidenced by relevant UN Security Council resolutions.

What was distinctive about this event is that it is not just the use of force for aggression. This is the use of blatant war crimes as a tool of naked aggression. The Russians started war crimes from day one, indiscriminate shelling from afar. We now see, in Bucha, that when they got up close, they tortured people; they bound them; in the case of women, they raped them; they summarily executed them; and they threw them into mass graves. This is one of the most blatant combinations of atrocity and aggression we have seen in many decades.

Thank you, Monica, and I have to say that I have just come from Iraq. I am in North America now, in Toronto. The implication on the tens of millions of people is that their life is destroyed for many generations to come.

Thank you very much, Monica. Let me start with a side remark that four years ago, the General Assembly adopted the decision designating the seventh of April, today, as an International Day on Reflection of Genocide in Rwanda. And it was suggested that the day of reflection, again today, offered an opportunity to consider the factors that had led to mass atrocity. And to renew the collective pledge of “Never again.” It is very symbolic. “Never again.” But it is going on right now. Harold just referenced to Bucha. So let us renew our pledge.

I am Kate Ferguson, co-executive director of Protection Approaches (PA), which is a London-based NGO. We work to transform how identity-based violence is understood in order to transform how it is prevented. I am not a lawyer. We have no lawyers on our team and we only have one lawyer on our panel. We are hoping for some knowledge exchange here, please, rather than just going one way.

Great. Thank you, Kate, and thanks to everybody for being here today. In January 2020, OutRight Action International and Human Rights Watch published a report called “Even if You Go to the Skies, We'll Find You,” regarding violence against LGBT people since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. What happened was in August of 2021 when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, there was an immediate reaction in terms of what was going to happen to LGBTQ people. I was finishing up my time at Human Rights Watch working in the LGBT Rights Program and was getting ready to transition to OutRight Action International.

Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Kate, for this introduction and for this wonderful panel. It is really exciting to be here and talk about our new paper, “Queering Atrocity Prevention.”

Wonderful. Thanks, Kate. It is great to be here. It is a tremendous honor to actually be on this panel with some folks that I know, and some new people, but I feel like I am going to learn a tremendous amount from being here, and so thanks, everyone, for joining us for this conversation as well.

Thanks. When I first received the invitation to speak on this panel and saw the cover of the Queering Atrocity Prevention report, and also considered the work that was done by OutRight and Human Rights Watch in the Afghanistan report, there were many things that excited me about this work, despite its horrendous content. I am going to talk about two in particular. The first is something that is a call or reaffirmation that I see in both papers for our legal policy and programmatic approaches, to take a more critical queer and feminist conception of gender and apply that to whether it is our frameworks of analysis or to the legal obligations that exist for states to prevent and to punish mass atrocities. This, of course, goes beyond just the adding in of LGBT people or, as has happened over the past twenty years, just adding women into our international frameworks or our policy frameworks as well, but really understanding how gender as a social and relational dynamic, how that impacts behavior and expectations of behavior, how that can drive human rights abuses, how it can drive atrocities, how it is the root cause of them in many cases, and how we need to consider how different policies impact differently gendered beings at the response stage as well. That was one of the first things that I am hoping that this paper brings, that it resurges this conversation as much as possible, whether it is scholarship or within the diplomatic community, where I was partly involved in my last work, and to see it become more widespread.

Amal Clooney unfortunately could not join us for health reasons but sends her warmest regards to everyone.

I became a journalist because information is power, and that leads to justice. If you do not have the facts, you cannot have rule of law. Part of what is happening today is that impunity reigns precisely because we have now made facts debatable. In the Nobel lecture, I talked about how disinformation exploded like an atom bomb in our ecosystem. Unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it did not kill 140,000 people immediately, but it is having that same impact. This is the last six years we have lived through.

On April 25, news broke that Elon Musk and Twitter had reached a deal wherein Musk would buy Twitter for $44 billion. When and whether the deal will actually be finalized is up in the air, however. Musk's recent tweet that the Twitter deal is on hold, combined with his call for the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate the amount of spam and bot accounts on Twitter, has contributed to uncertainty among investors about the future of the deal. Twitter stock has dropped, and the departure of high-level staff at Twitter has also signaled that the future of Musk's Twitter acquisition is murky.

Good morning and welcome. I am Professor Rebecca Hamilton from American University, Washington College of Law, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to convene this Roundtable on Translational Law in honor of Detlev Vagts.