Marina Lostal

• PhD (EUI) LLM (Cambridge)
• Senior Lecturer at University of Essex

Animals are the unknown victims of armed conflicts. Wildlife populations usually decline during warfare, with disastrous repercussions on the food chain, on fragile ecosystems and precarious habitats. Belligerents take advantage of the chaos of war for poaching and trafficking of animal products. Livestock, companion, and zoo animals, highly depend...

This chapter explains the basic provisions for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict and occupation. It first offers an overview of the history of plunder and destruction of cultural property until the time where there was a shift in attitude and this practice started to be considered unlawful. Then, it examines the legal framework...

The city of Timbuktu evokes remoteness and, since 2012, chaos and destruction. During an armed conflict in the north of Mali, radicals took over the city and destroyed several of its mausoleums. One of the perpetrators, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, was convicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his participation in the destruction of 10 rel...

The legal framework of the International Criminal Court does not contain any provision concerning animals. This stands in contrast with the frequency with which they appear in both trial and reparations proceedings. The silence of the legal framework is problematic insofar as the ‘animal turn movement’, which questions the classical understanding a...

This article presents the preliminary findings of a scoping study that Geneva Call is conducting to understand the existing dynamics between armed non-state actors (ANSAs) and cultural heritage. Geneva Call is a Swiss-based non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting the respect of international humanitarian law by ANSAs. The study centres...

This book fills gaps in the exploration of the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict based on the World Heritage Convention. Marina Lostal offers a new perspective, designating a specific protection regime to world cultural heritage sites, which is so far lacking despite the fact that such sites are increasingly targeted. Lostal spells...

Transitional justice is considered a building block of peacebuilding in post-conflict scenarios. Processes may include criminal justice mechanisms, reparation programmes, truth-seeking bodies and institutional reforms which seek to provide redress for victims of human rights atrocities. However, it is now widely acknowledged that the destruction of...

This article comes as the conflict in Syria has entered its fifth year, bringing with it loss of life and the displacement of the Syrian people as well as extensive damage to, and destruction of, the country’s cultural heritage. This article will first provide an overview and explanation of the national and international legal framework for protect...

In 2013, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, announced an ambitious new agenda for Chinese foreign policy: the Silk Road Economic Belt. Heralded as a gift from China to the world, his envisioned program aims to resurrect the historical Silk Road, which linked East and West by land and sea. The historical Silk Road was built to facilitate trade, but...

Reports have confirmed damage to five of the six Syrian World Heritage Sites during the current armed conflict as well as extensive looting of several of its archaeological sites on the Tentative List of world heritage. This article examines the role and fate of Syrian world cultural heritage from the beginning of the conflict, maps out the differe...

Specific discipline principles are recurrently used in legal argumentation and in scholarly publications; yet, no single work has elucidated their concept and role in international law. This article sheds some light on this question by conducting a parallel analysis of two international domains –environmental and cultural heritage law - that, despi...

This article addresses R. O’Keefe’s 1999 publication entitled ‘The Meaning of “Cultural Property” under the 1954 Hague Convention’. There the author made two points regarding the protection of ‘cultural objects and places of worship’ in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 that have been commonly shared by legal scho...

Desde que estallara la guerra de los Balcanes hasta ahora se han producido tres eventos importantes para el derecho de la protección de bienes culturales en los conflictos armados: la adopción del Estatuto del Tribunal Penal Internacional para la ex Yugoslavia, que otorga jurisdicción a este tribunal para juzgar delitos contra los bienes culturales...

The field of cultural property protection in armed conflict is composed of “many laws but little law” (Sadeleer, 2002, p. 267). There is a staggering number of conventions that make little sense when put together. This is for three reasons: (1) there is no single understanding of what “cultural property” or “protection” stands for; (2) the greater...

This chapter attempts to elucidate the up-to-date blur rapport between the main legal regimes for protecting cultural property on the battlefield, taking the Ibero-American scenario as a sample. The first two parts present very succinctly how the 20th Century paved the path for cultural heritage norms to constitute a distinct branch of law; the thi...