The organizers of this year’s ESIL conference are pleased to announce the topic of the 2016 Current Events Forum in Riga: Current Challenges in Countering Terrorism - Preventive and Punitive Responses. The forum is set to take place on Friday, 9 September at 17:30.

The panel will address preventive and punitive dimensions of incitement to terrorism, including through the Internet, together with legal and other dimensions of the foreign terrorist fighter phenomenon. Both topics will be discussed against the framework of international law and put into the European context through assessments of the draft EU Directive on countering terrorism (aimed at replacing the 2002 Framework Decision) and reflections on recent terrorist attacks in Europe, including ISIS-inspired suicide terrorism.

The three panelists will be:

• Helen DUFFY, Director of ‘Human Rights in Practice,’ based in The Hague, which specializes in strategic human rights litigation and Gieskes Professor of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, University of Leiden;
• Christophe PAULUSSEN, Senior Researcher at the Asser Institute and Research Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, where he served as co-author of the major study 'The Foreign Fighters Phenomenon in the European Union’ (2016);
• Martin SCHEININ, Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the European University Institute and former UN Special Reporter on human rights and counter-terrorism, in which capacity he issued several thematic reports on aspects of counter-terrorism measures.

The Chair of the forum is Jānis Kažociņš, National Security Adviser to the President of the Republic of Latvia and Secretary to the National Security Council.