It is a great honor for me to speak on behalf of fellow judges who did all those weight lifting in the past two days. Firstly I will congratulate all team members for presenting the best of yourselves throughout the competition, and I know many of you will credit your success to your coach and others, but no one can deny that you are the shiniest stars tonight.
I also would like to thank ICRC, the Red Cross Society of China and the Guilin University of Electronic Technology for hosting this yearly event and for their warm welcome and hospitality. Many mooters would agree that moot court competition is the most cost-effective way to verify and operationalize legal knowledge learned through curricular courses, but very few of us dare take the laboring oar as moot organizers. How about a round of applause to Xinyan, Miss Lin and many other unsung heroes and heroines? Thank you for your hard work, dedication and persistence.
As the presiding judge for the final match, I have to say a few words about the case and your performance. But my tongue is tied up by the rule of the competition, and I am not supposed to touch upon merits of the case. For those who will attend the Asia-Pacific regional round, I wish you all good luck and continuing success. This case is full of factual information, which creates quite a challenge for you to digest and align them with the applicable legal norms. Besides a timeline which I agree being helpful, perhaps you can think about regrouping the facts into different categories, which can add a new perspective and offer a more critical way of thinking and reasoning. Despite a simulated case, you can find striking parallels in Gaza, Yemen and many other ongoing conflicts across the world. In that sense, International Humanitarian Law is living and expanding itself much further than the Geneva Conventions, the case laws of ICC, ICTY and ICTR.
That brings me to my last point, witnessing those ongoing conflicts and endless civilian sufferings, would you become upset and doubt so called “even wars have rules”? It is indeed ironic while we argued passionately around a simulated case, IHL is violated daily with rampant impunity on the ground. But I found the city of Guilin offered an answer 80 years ago, during the darkest days of World War II, a cave in the rural area of Guilin was transformed into a school, then under the heavy bombardment, you still heard reading, singing, and dancing, the beautiful sound of civilization defied the brutal violence.
I was informed that recently that cave was reconstructed into a bookstore and a cafe, not sure we have time to visit, but I hope you will remember this story, hold dear the unconquerable strength of civilization including IHL as well as our moot court competition in Guilin, and stand up firmly for the high call that even wars have rules, and the rules must count.
