Ola Engdahl – författare

The 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel (Safety Convention) was the first multilateral convention to deal specifically with the protection of personnel engaged in peace operations. It should be viewed against the background of the increasingly volatile environments in which peace operation personnel were required to operate at the beginning of the 1990s. An Optional Protocol, extending the automatic application of the Safety Convention to new categories of operation, was adopted in December 2005. Protection, which a host government is responsible for securing for personnel in peace operations, may be categorised as general and special protection. The former includes, for example, human rights law and international humanitarian law. The latter comprises privileges and immunities accorded to agents of states or organisations. The contribution of the Safety Convention is mainly one of interstate penal law co-operation. States parties are obligated to co-operate in order to effectively prosecute the perpetrators of stipulated crimes. The protection afforded by the Safety Convention may therefore be categorised as being part of an emerging legal regime against impunity. An effective protection needs to address the specific challenges surrounding peace operations. Some of these challenges, identified in this study, are related to the interplay between the rules of peace and war as well as responsibility and accountability of protected personnel. It is also contended that there is a need for an effective implementation of existing rules, and a careful development of so-called status-of-forces agreements applicable in peace operations.

The authors of this volume have been inspired by the scholar to which this Liber Amicorum is dedicated - Professor Ove Bring - to look into both the past and the future of international law. Like Ove Bring, they have dealt with many aspects of the law governing the use of force, from arms control to human rights, international criminal law, the UN Charter, and, of course, international humanitarian law. Like Professor Bring, they have allowed themselves to draw trajectories from history and into the future, and have shunned away from neither the controversial nor the speculative, be it on the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq or the independence of Kosovo.This collection brings together insights from a former UN Legal Counsel, a former Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC, present and former judges of the European Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, one present and one former member of the International Law Commission, as well as law professors and practitioners, from all Nordic countries, Germany and Australia. Together they form a highly challenging mosaic of perspectives on topical issues like cluster munitions, targeting, human rights in peace operations and the purposes of sentencing in international tribunals.The volume also contains a bibliography and a presentation of Professor Bring's work.