In this paper I explore some of the ways in which developments in new digital technologies reproduce, and often amplify, the patriarchal structures, practices and culture of contemporary life and, in doing so, operate to silence women through exclusion and through violence. I consider how international human rights law – most notably the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – can be harnessed to counter both forms of silencing in that each is rooted in gender-based discrimination. The digital gender divide and the rise in online violence against women evidences the failure on the part of States Parties to fully commit to their legal obligations pursuant to CEDAW. Ensuring equality of access to, and use of, digital technologies cannot be anything other than the preconditions to ensuring that women can benefit from, contribute to, and influence the development of digital technologies in a meaningful manner. The digital realm may be a privatised public space that warrants a reconceptualisation of the scope and content of human rights law but the fact that much of the digital infrastructure is owned and controlled by private actors does not absolve States of their human rights responsibilities.

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Skilfully assembled and edited by Dianne Otto, Queering International Law is a collection of papers that exemplifies what Anne Orford and Florian Hoffman have recently described as one of the most exciting aspects of new research in international legal scholarship: 'thinking in innovative ways about the relation between the theory, history, and practice of international law'. 1 The collection is the product of a legal theory workshop inspired and organized by Otto in 2015 at the Melbourne Law School to 'promote a better understanding of the complicities and compromises that engagement with power, in the form of international law, may extract' (at 9). Traces of Otto's rich body of scholarship and her infectious commitment to international law as a project that has the potential to deliver 'a more egalitarian, inclusive, peaceful, just and redistributive international order' are discernible in each of the contributions, which, nonetheless, maintain their own distinct voice and perspective. Otto is a master of fostering intellectual exchange and, thus, Queering International Law can also be read as a densely packed conversation between and among legal scholars who share Otto's ability to work across different methodological and theoretical traditions and who do not cower from engaging with extra-legal material.The title of the collection immediately provokes a number of questions: What does queering international law entail; what can it contribute to the discipline; how, if at all, can international law be queered? Otto does not keep us in suspense for long and, in her lucid introduction, begins to answer our questions while preparing us for what is to follow conceptually and methodologically. Queer theory, she emphasizes, is more than simply about normative inclusion (at 1); rather (and to paraphrase Otto), it is an alternative critical method that, in reframing legal problems through the analytic prism of sexuality, sheds further light on the conceptual and analytic underpinnings of international law, thereby introducing the possibility to craft new solutions.Otto is at her best when grappling with what critical engagement entails. She does so with a rich foray into the genealogy of curiosity, a human trait that is feared, maligned, disciplined and celebrated. We are urged to engage with curiosity transgressively (at 6), which is precisely what queer theory seeks to do, in common with other critical traditions including, most notably, feminist methods (at 5). For Otto, it is the transgressive engagement with curiosity that opens up the space to interrogate and reveal the particular ways in which dominant ideologies consolidate and enhance existing inequalities, including through international law. As the contributions to this collection demonstrate, queer engagement is concerned with exposing international law's complicity in those practices of inequality, with elucidating how sexuality and sexual and gender norms are constituted and deployed by the law as organizing principles, and, by making apparent what is emb...

Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip from 27 December 2008 until 18 January 2009 raised a host of legal questions on status and the conduct of hostilities, many of which have been subjected to intense scrutiny. But perhaps the two most troubling questions that remain unresolved concern the appropriate legal regime that governed the conflict and the geographical reach of the law. Was this an international armed conflict? If so, who were the ‘contracting parties’ and what was the territorial scope of the conflict? Alternatively, was the armed conflict one between a state, Israel, and a non-state actor, Hamas, and thus subject to the rules that apply in non-international armed conflict? This latter position jars with our intuition not least because the codified law assumes non-international armed conflict takes placewithinthe territory of a contracting state. The disquiet is apparent in the Israeli Supreme Court judgment of 2009,Physicians for Human Rights v. Prime Minister, in which the Court had to determine the legal regime governing the armed conflict between Israel and ‘the Hamas organization’. Describing the normative ‘arrangements’ as ‘complex’, it noted that ‘the classification of the armed conflict between the state of Israel and the Hamas organization as an international conflict raises several difficulties’.

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