In June 2017, the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflicts published a briefing on ‘Armed Non-State Actors and International Human Rights Law: An Analysis of the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly’. In this blog post, I demonstrate why the briefing – and the data collected in the annexes – is an important addition to knowledge in this area that will facilitate important discussion of this issue amongst policy makers. In order to start this discussion, I highlight a few particular aspects of the report that I find most interesting and valuable. In doing so, I explain inter alia why I disagree with the authors’ conclusion that no pattern is discernible in how the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly address armed non State actors. I end the post by giving some suggestions about how the data collected by the study may provide rich potential for even further analysis.  Lees verder →