Hybrid CoE organised a two-day seminar on Legal Resilience, discussing legal vulnerabilities of legislation as well as how resilience can be improved through law. The seminar brought together over 40 participants from different branches of government, embassies of the Centre’s member states, as well as academia.
The first keynote speaker, Colonel Serhii Verbytskyi from the Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, spoke about the Ukrainian experience of hybrid influencing and the legal issues tackling them. Dr Aurel Sari, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, gave an overview of how the concept of legal resilience relates to hybrid threats. In the context of hybrid warfare, legal resilience refers to the ability of a legal system to persist and adapt in the face of hybrid threats, and to support other social systems and processes in countering threats.
In the afternoon, the participants focused on a table-top exercise (TTX) during which national solutions were examined, looking at best practices, which could be shared among member states. On the second day, topics such as dual citizenship, modern crisis legislation, public-private partnership and energy security issues were discussed.
Part of the sessions were held under Helsinki ++ rules, meaning non-disclosure and non-attribution. This enabled open discussion and sharing best practices among member states. During those sessions only vetted personnel was allowed to participate.
The overall aim is 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.
