Registration for the conference ‘International Humanitarian Assistance and International Law: A Legal Approach to Practical Problems’ is now open. This conference will take place on 24 and 25 January 2013 in Leiden, the Netherlands.

The aim of the conference is to bring experts in the field of international humanitarian assistance together and to explore various fields of law relating to humanitarian assistance, like international humanitarian law, human rights law, international disaster response law, and other fields.

Conference Theme: As a concept, international humanitarian assistance is receiving widespread attention from international organizations, NGOs, and other actors involved in the practice of aid delivery, yet it is deserving further research by scholars of public international law. There are many legal issues, ambiguities, and questions that arise time and again when humanitarian assistance is needed, or when it is being delivered. These issues relate, inter alia, to the rights of the people in need of assistance, to the role of the affected states,to the specific circumstances in which humanitarian assistance is provided, to the duties of entities providing assistance as well as to the access of goods or relief personnel. Extensive research is still required to address these problems, in the hopes of making the provision of humanitarian assistance more effective. This conference aims at bringing together those scholars and practitioners active in this field, in order to bring about some much needed clarity on this topic.

Junior and senior scholars, practitioners, PhD candidates and students are invited to register for the conference at our website: http://law.leiden.edu/research/news/conference-intern-humanitarian-assistance.html.