Mary Ellen O’Connell was quoted in The Guardian article Woman seized in anti-Isis raid poses policy problems for US on May 18.
Abstract
Mary Ellen O’Connell was quoted in The Guardian article Woman seized in anti-Isis raid poses policy problems for US on May 18.
Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame, said that under international law, the US is technically required to hand Umm Sayyaf over to the government of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. “We don’t want to do that, obviously,” she said.
“The next best thing,” O’Connell said, would be to rely on the International Committee of the Red Cross for “removing her to a place of detention, in a place where she will be treated according to international humanitarian law, and I would ask the International Committee of the Red Cross to make that transfer”, perhaps to a detention center in Jordan.