On the 27th of November, Hybrid CoE organised a Seminar on Resilient Legislation, discussing about legal vulnerabilities and resilience. The seminar brought together some 30 participants from different branches of government and embassies of the Centre’s member states. The seminar was the first stage in expanding of our Community of Interest (COI) “Vulnerabilities and Resilience” coordinated by Director Jukka Savolainen. The COI will organise workshops, seminars, tabletop exercises and other useful events reinforcing resilience and shedding light on vulnerabilities. The Community of Interest also aims to generate topics for research, best practices and possible policy proposals and to define the way forward.
The seminar included three presentations and a panel discussion. The first presentation was a case study from Ukraine by Dmytro Zolotukhin, followed by an analysis on law in the era of hybrid threats by Aurel Sari. Improving resilience through what is feasible in terms of law and administrative experience was addressed in the third presentation by Tiina Ferm.
The next step is to give a more concrete shape to the activities to be undertaken over the course of 2018. The meeting confirmed that there is merit in further work on legal vulnerabilities and resilience, but that the subject is potentially unlimited in scope and that, therefore, we need to find ways in which CoE can add value and deliver outputs that are of practical relevance to stakeholders.
Best practices, exercising and research in focus
Three work streams include (1) sharing best practices; (2) experimentation and exercising, and (3) in-depth research. In 2018, Hybrid CoE will host 1–2 workshops to share best practices on issues, such as:
- using the law to resist hostile influence activities
- regulating (dual) citizenship and (dual) nationality
- legal responses to disinformation
- states of emergency/war
- the legal framework of the domestic use of military assets outside armed conflict
- legal aspects of host nation support.
The experimentation and exercising stream is to test and refine concepts, to shed light on legal vulnerabilities, threats and assets and to explore response mechanisms and procedures. A possible and yet to be defined in-depth research stream is to harness the expertise of a broader community of scholars to gain a deeper understanding of a range of relevant themes and subjects.
