WATERTOWN — The Armenian National Committee (ANC) of Boston is hosting a webinar on the current situation in Artsakh. This free and open online event will be held on Thursday, March 9, at 7 p.m. Please click here to register for the event and receive an individual zoom link.
This online presentation, hosted by Ani Zargarian, will feature Professor Milena Sterio, the Charles R. Emrick Jr. – Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. Professor Sterio’s presentation will be entitled “The Artsakh Conflict: International Law, Self-Determination and Remedial Secession.”
International law establishes that specific groups are entitled to self-determination; that they have the right to auto-determine their political fate. The right to self-determination clearly applies to colonized and subjugated peoples; it is possible to argue that this right also applies to oppressed groups whose rights have been severely violated by their parent state. Self-determination is typically exercised through secession, whereby the relevant group secedes from the territory of its parent state to join another state or to form its own independent state. Sterio will discuss the right to self-determination as well as the process of secession in the context of Artsakh, and she will analyze whether the people of Artsakh are entitled to the exercise of the right of self-determination through remedial secession.
The Managing Director of the Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG), Sterio is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. She is one of the six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In spring 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh). She has participated as an expert at hearings of the International Criminal Court on various international criminal law issues. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. She is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
The audience will have the opportunity to engage the speaker in a Q&A session following the presentation.
