Lecture: 'The UN's tortious liability in peacekeeping missions' - Prof Dr Kirsten Schmalenbach, Paris-Lodron University, Salzburg

Time: 4.30 pm - 6 pm

Commentator: Prof Kristina Daugirdas, University of Michigan

For almost 80 years, the United Nations (UN) has been carrying out peacekeeping missions in some of the world's most troubled regions. However, the deployment of troops in this capacity and in these environments inevitably leads to third-party damage. Against this backdrop, the heart of the UN Tort Law project is an analysis of the UN’s internal processing of these claims which are resolved outside of domestic courts and arbitral tribunals. The research focuses on the legal rules and standards applied by the UN administration when deciding upon the compensability of individual claims. However, it has proven particularly challenging to identify the substantive liability rules applied by the UN as the Organisation goes to great lengths to conceal its past and current claim settlement practices from not only academic but, indeed, any public scrutiny. For instance, in 2014 the UN Office of Legal Affairs reclassified all the relevant archival claim settlement files as strictly confidential. With the above in mind, the presentation will discuss how the research addresses the many perceived gaps in the fabric of the UN´s liability rules. The fundamental methodological issues that arise are associated with the legal value of UN practices and internal documents, the international rule of law and the relevance of general principles of tort law as gap fillers.

* This project is funded in whole by the Austria Science Fund (FWF), Funding period 2021 – 2025; grant-DIO 10.55776/P33732

Professor Dr Kirsten Schmalenbach graduated with a law degree from the University of Cologne, where she obtained her teaching qualification in public law, European Union law, and public international law in 2002. After a position as a lecturer at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, she accepted a post as a full professor at the Institute for International Law and International Relations at the University of Graz in Austria in 2003. Since 2010, she has been a full professor of international and European Union law at the Paris-Lodron University in Salzburg (Austria). In addition to her professorship, she has, inter alia, served on the Academic Advisory Boards of various universities, the Advisory Board for European Union Law at the Austrian Foreign Ministry, the Advisory Boards for International Human Rights Law at the German and Austrian Foreign Ministries, and the Editorial Board of the International Organisations Law Review. Throughout her career, Professor Schmalenbach has focused on various aspects of public international law and is recognised for her work on the law of international organisations, international responsibility and liability, and legal sources of international law (co-editor of the 2018 Commentary on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Springer International). She is currently the principal investigator of the UN Tort Law Project concerning the third-party liability of the United Nations in peacekeeping missions, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (2021–2025).

This event is in person only and will not be recorded.