This book wouldn’t come to fruition without the continued support of my wife Dorothy Zhang as well as my mother Marijke D’hondt and father Thomas Vandamme. They have been there to take care of our daughter Elice as I was writing in weekends and spending extended time overseas in Geneva, Oxford and Melbourne to carry out research for this topic on the law of international humanitarian relief in non-international armed conflicts.
My research during my visiting fellowships at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights (Summer 2018) and the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (elac), Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (Summer 2019), Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law (apcml), Law School, University of Melbourne (Spring 2020) would not have been possible without the funding from the KoGuan School of Law as well as the Chinese Foreign Expert Grant from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (sjtu). I am particularly grateful to my colleagues for their generous support to my research, especially Jinhua Cheng, Liyang Hou, Weidong Ji, Hongzhen Jiang, Yuan Jiao, Xiangjun Kong, Wenkai Li, Chengxin Peng, Houji Wang, Nan Wang, Donggen Xu and Guifang Xue.
I am thankful to my friends and colleagues at the icrc – at headquarters and in the regional divisions in Asia – for their invaluable support and input on this book project, in particular, Ahmed Aldawoody, Margherita D’Asconio, Benjamin Charlier, Bruno Demeyere, Jean-Marie Henckaerts, Georgia Hinds, Etienne Kuster, Xinyan Liu, Nishat Nishat, Jelena Pejic, Jan Römer, Yves Sandoz, Kelisiana Thynne and Wen Zhou. The icrc’s East Asia delegation in Beijing has been very active in the promotion of ihl in the region and I am grateful for their invitations to participate in their various activities. I have benefited greatly from the feedback on parts of this project from the participants in the Advanced ihl Summer Sessions for Academics in China (China University of Political Science and Law (September 2017) and Peking University (August 2019)) and from the participants at the conferences “Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Adoption of the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions” (Beijing, 19–20 May 2017), “The Geneva Conventions at 70: Renewing the Commitment” (Beijing, 7–8 September 2019) and “Asia-Pacific Perspectives on International Humanitarian Law” (Hangzhou, 7–7 December 2019).
I am very grateful to Professor Marco Sassòli for hosting me and for his generous feedback as my research progresses at the Geneva Academy. Special thanks to Annyssa Bellal, Christophe Golay, Felix Kirchmeier, Kamelia Kemileva and
I am also grateful to the staff at the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern for their guidance through the relevant negotiating history of the 1977 Additional Protocol ii to the Geneva Conventions, in particular Silvia Scherz, Marine Van Den Driessche, Gilda Volery and Beat Vonlanthen.
I am indebted to my other friends and colleagues who have been supportive of this project in numerable ways: Mashood Baderin (soas), Weitseng Chen (nus), John Dugard (Leiden), Matthew Erie (Oxford), Quazi Foysal (aiub), Tom Ginsburg (Chicago), Gregory Gordon (cuhk), Christopher Heyns (Pretoria), Xiao Mao (Oxford), Timothy McCormack (Tasmania), Peter Muchlinski (soas), Sasha Radin (Westpoint), Javaid Rehman (Brunel), Andreas Schüller (ECCHR), Ayesha Shahid (Coventry), Sandesh Sivakumaran (Cambridge), Kim Van der Borght (vub) and Kris Yu (Oxford), Lijiang Zhu (cupl) and Wenqi Zhu (Renmin).
Special thanks to my students at sjtu for their wonderful research assistance: Monika Godeska, Tooba Khurshid, Lyn Li and Fengmi Xiang.
I would like to thank Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press too for reproducing here parts of earlier work published respectively in the International Review of the Red Cross1 and the Journal of Conflict and Security Law.2
Many thanks to Amazonas Images and Sebastião Salgado for their permission to reproduce the picture taken at the make-shift refugee camp in Benako, Tanzanie, in 1994, for the cover of this book.
A special thanks goes to my colleagues at Brill/Nijhoff, in particular Lindy Melman and Kavipriya V., for overseeing the smooth and professional production of this volume.
Matthias Vanhullebusch 马天赐
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China
Summer 2021
Matthias Vanhullebusch, “The Crystallization of a Prohibition of Arbitrary Denial in Non-International Armed Conflicts: Prospects, Challenges and Ways Ahead,” International Review of the Red Cross (2021) (Forthcoming).
Matthias Vanhullebusch, “Do Non-State Armed Groups Have a Legal Right to Consent to International Humanitarian Relief?,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law 25(2) (2020): 317–341.