November 2013

LJIL Symposium: Roger O’Keefe’s comment on Maarten Den Heijer’s “Diplomatic Asylum and the Assange Case”

[Dr. Roger O’Keefe is a University Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and the Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law] Maarten Den Heijer’s excellent and enjoyable article ‘Diplomatic Asylum and the Assange Case’ provides a welcome account of an area of international law in which vagueness and uncertainty have too long been the order of the day. On its own terms, which accept as read the International Court of Justice’s statements in the Asylum case, it is coherent and by no means unpersuasive. Whatever one might say as to the merely subsidiary role of international judicial decisions in the determination of rules of international law, it takes a certain doctrinaire obduracy or plain arrogance to dismiss out of hand what the ICJ has declared. All the same, the Court is not beyond unreflective restatement of the received wisdom, and it is not impertinent to engage in the heuristic exercise of proceeding from first principles on any point pronounced upon by the Court. One point that might profit from just such an exercise is the question of the lawfulness of the grant of diplomatic asylum by a sending state, by which is meant that state’s grant of harbour within its inviolable diplomatic premises to a fugitive from the competent authorities of the receiving state. The starting point of any such analysis from first principles must be the Lotus presumption. A state is at liberty to do what it is not prohibited by a positive rule of international law from doing. In this light, there is no need to identify a positive right on the part of the sending state to accord diplomatic asylum. Rather, one needs to point to a positive prohibition on the practice. The two most likely sources of any such prohibition are, first, diplomatic law and, secondly, the prohibition on intervention in the affairs of another state. But it is not self-evident that either prohibits a sending state from according diplomatic asylum, at least as a general rule. It is difficult to identify in diplomatic law a positive prohibition on the use by the sending state of the inviolability of its diplomatic premises to prevent the authorities of the receiving state from securing custody of a wanted individual. The VCDR contains no specific prohibition on the practice. Nor do the inconsistency of state practice and the ambivalence of its accompanying opinio juris suggest any such rule. Any prohibition on the practice of diplomatic asylum, insofar as it derives from diplomatic law, must be deduced from other rules of this body of international law. The rule regularly highlighted in this regard, as it is by Maarten [at 413-4], is article 41(3) VCDR, which provides in relevant part that the premises of the mission ‘must not be used in any manner incompatible with the functions of the mission as laid down in the present Convention or by other rules of general international law’. In this regard, pace Maarten [at 413], ‘incompatible with’ plainly means ‘inconsistent with’ or, synonymously, ‘contrary to’: incompatibility is not a question simply of whether the impugned conduct ‘falls outside the scope of ordinary diplomatic functions’, whatever ‘ordinary’ may mean. In turn, the functions of a diplomatic mission within the meaning of article 41(3) VCDR are the subject of article 3(1) VCDR, which states that these functions ‘consist inter alia in’ the activities specified in subparagraphs (a) to (e). As indicated by the words ‘inter alia’, the list given in subparagraphs (a) to (e) is not exhaustive, and it is not utterly inconceivable that one of the functions of a diplomatic mission may, in appropriate cases, be the furnishing of diplomatic asylum. But be that as it may. More to the point is that the only one of the five functions of a diplomatic mission specified in article 3(1) with which the grant of diplomatic asylum could be considered incompatible is that mentioned in article 3(1)(e), namely ‘promoting friendly relations between the sending State and the receiving State’. But, contrary to what Maarten considers arguable [at 413-4], it is evident from the consistent practice of states that not every act on the part of a foreign diplomatic mission of which the receiving state disapproves is to be characterised as incompatible with the promotion of friendly relations between sending and receiving states. Something positively inimical to the interests of the receiving state is seemingly required. To this end, it is of course perfectly plausible that harbouring a fugitive from the criminal justice system or other authorities of the receiving state is to be considered an inimical act. Yet it is hard to admit that this is so unless such harbouring is itself contrary to international law. In other words, it is not easy to accept that an act in itself internationally lawful is incompatible with the promotion of friendly relations between the sending and receiving states. This brings us to the prohibition on a state’s intervention or interference in the internal or external affairs of another state.

LJIL Symposium: A Comment on Maarten Den Heijer’s “Diplomatic Asylum and the Assange Case”

[Gregor Noll is a Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University in Sweden, and is an expert in International, Theory of International, and Refugee and Migration Law.] With admirable calm and clarity, Maarten den Heijer’s text considers the relationship between territorial sovereignty and diplomatic inviolability played out in diplomatic asylum. Describing both poles as ‘legal trump cards’ in their own right, he argues the insolubility of their conflict in law. He writes ‘that the status quo, although not guaranteeing a uniform of “just” practice of diplomatic asylum, provides a befitting equilibrium between the right of the receiving and sending states’. This equilibrium, befitting or otherwise, ‘puts incentives into place for avoiding and resolving disputes by diplomatic means’. As it were, the international law of diplomatic asylum is incapable to offer more at this historical stage. I greatly appreciate den Heijer’s ability to keep that conflict alive throughout his eminently readable text. At large, I have no quarrel with his conclusion. Yet I feel a bit hesitant to align myself fully with it yet. This is mainly for two reasons, both related to the way he tells the story of diplomatic asylum.

LJIL Symposium: A Response to Professor Gabby Blum and Professor Chris Kutz

[Dr. Janina Dill is a Hedley Bull Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations and Research Fellow in Politics at Merton College, Oxford] I am very grateful to Gabby Blum and Chris Kutz for their thoughtful comments on my paper. We agree on the fundamental challenge: killing combatants in accordance with the principle of distinction under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is morally problematic. In my paper I engage the preferred remedy of a growing number of philosophers, which is to distinguish between individuals who are liable to being killed and those who are not. I show why it is impossible for IHL to regulate warfare accordingly. Nonetheless, I accept such an individual rights-based approach to justifying killing as morally appropriate in war. Professor Blum disagrees on the grounds that “killing in battle is not designed to be an execution”. That is, of course, true. Acts in war are an appropriate means to mete out neither moral nor legal punishment. But can we therefore dismiss as irrelevant the moral status of the individuals whose deliberate killing IHL sanctions? The impetus behind Blum’s own proposal is the conviction that combatants’ lives are no less valuable than others’. From this acceptance that all human life is of prima facie equal value generally springs the notion that individuals have a right to their own life that they can forfeit only through their own conduct. Blum holds that in war posing a threat is enough to be subject to the threatened combatant’s right to (presumably lethal) self-defense. It has to be an actual, immediate threat, not the kind of presumed potential threat that IHL is satisfied with, but it “does not matter if someone threatening is also morally guilty, because we have a right to defend ourselves even against the morally-innocent attacker,” or so Blum argues. I do not have the space to problematize the terms innocent and guilty here, but even if the would-be defender had no involvement in bringing about the situation in which he is threatened, his right to use lethal force against a likewise completely innocent attacker would at least be questionable. Crucially, this innocent threat/innocent defender scenario is rarely encountered in war. What if the would-be defender was guilty himself of posing a threat? The likeliest case in war is that the combatant supposedly exercising self-defense at the same time poses a threat to his attacker. Normally, in this case we decide who actually has a right to self-defense by making a judgement about the difference in moral status. That the victim of an assault uses force to fight back does not give her attacker a moral right to defend himself. If we refuse to take moral status into account and insist on the symmetry between combatants on both sides, such cases of “mutual self-defense” reduce the principle to absurdity. I do not argue that we should change IL either to reflect the liability approach or to challenge the symmetry between belligerents. Moreover, I wholeheartedly agree with Blum that it would be legally and morally preferable if IHL allowed the killing of fewer combatants and demanded that those who can be are spared. While such proposals have met with criticism by military practitioners, they certainly raise fewer concerns of practicability than distinction according to individual liability. Yet, they do not solve the problem this paper grapples with: the fact that IHL does not and, I argue, cannot vouchsafe the protection of individual rights in war. In his considered engagement with my paper Professor Kutz raises two questions that, in the kindest possible way, query my grasp on reality.

LJIL Symposium: A Comment on Dr. Janina Dill’s “Should International Law Ensure the Moral Acceptability of War?”

[Christopher L. Kutz is a Professor of Law at University of California, Berkeley, and is the Director of the Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs] Janina Dill has written a smart and provocative paper, providing a powerful argument against what one might call “naive moralism” in the ethics of war.  In this, she is responding to a body of recent and influential work, of which American philosopher Jeff McMahan’s writing forms the core, which has offered an individual-centered moral analysis of the rules of war, meant to supplant the state-centered view of classical Just War Theory (JWT).  Against some of the natural conclusions one might draw from a moralized theory, Dill argues that the essentially collective nature of the ethics of war should be preserved, on epistemic grounds.  In particular, the collective liability of combatants, and immunity of civilians, is best explained by the difficulty of refining a moral analysis in many plausible cases of conflict. According to classical JWT, the ius ad bellum and the ius in bello are strictly separated, in the sense that the legality or legitimacy of the war as a whole rides independently of the liability of the individual participants in the war.  On this view, whether or not a belligerent state (and its leaders) are fighting a legal or illegal war, soldiers of those states are liable to be targeted just in virtue of their membership in the armed forces; by contrast, civilian non-combatants are immune from deliberate targeting whatever political support they have manifested for even an aggressive war.  Thus, in World War II, British and Wehrmacht soldiers stood on the same legal footing (attackable, and only liable for individual war crimes), as do pacifist British citizens and Nazi-supporting German civilians (immune from attack).  This collective, status-based approach to targetability is notably different from the individualized assessment of liability to attack that characterizes the criminal law, in which individuals are only targetable when they present particular threats to the lives or vital interests of others; and the permission to use lethal force is only granted to those defending vital interests (of themselves or others), and often not when that defense is the result of the defendant’s own wrongdoing (p. 8). In a number of recent books and papers, Jeff McMahan has argued that there are no plausible direct moral foundations for JWT, because on any compelling moral analysis — that is, any analysis sufficiently compelling to make claims about liability to lethal attack plausible — liability must be determined by individual culpability.  And when we take individual culpability into account, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that many individual soldiers — namely those permissibly defending themselves and others — are not so liable, while many non-combatants are.  McMahan himself avoids any direct action-guiding conclusion from his analysis, because of the prospect that absent clear rules of collective distinction, too much horror will result from an attempt by combatants to make the relevant distinctions. Dill accepts the McMahanian moral analysis, but she rejects the revisionary conclusion, that we should seek to tune our doctrines of war to more individualistic determinations.  Instead, she looks to alternative moral foundations for the collective character of war. To my mind, the most interesting aspect of a very interesting and perceptive article is her working through these alternatives.  She considers first the idea that war might nonetheless be given a consequentialist justification: that the gross principle of distinction, if applied in good faith by just and unjust belligerent nations alike, would be a “lesser evil” resulting in net fewer unjustified deaths.  But as she argues, there is no reason to think the material outcomes of current JWT do a better job than any alternative in minimizing unjustified deaths, since military victory is a consequence of material rather than moral factors.  More importantly, an individual moral analysis would result in the conclusion that aggressor soldiers should simply “keep still,” and cease presenting any threat to others.  Whatever one might say on behalf of JWT, one cannot think it approximates an outcome whose ideal case is the sudden pacifism of all of one side’s combatants, plus all of the others who are no longer at risk. The conclusion she draws is subtle.  Dill treats as central the “epistemically cloaked” nature of the choices presented by war, where the fog of war makes individual liability determinations implausible, and the tendency of even aggressors fighting (wrongly) in good-faith belief of permissibility makes war inevitable.  In such cases, when nations turn to war, IHL properly guides actors towards morally superior outcomes, even if it does not make those outcomes defensible in absolute terms. As she says, if something is indefensible, it cannot be made defensible by epistemic considerations.  But the benefits of a rule-of-law approach to war, with over- and under-inclusive bright lines, may itself be morally valuable, in serving to constrain the overall enterprise while recognizing its systematic, i.e. Collective, character.  This is, essentially, a Razian analysis of the value of using non-moral norms to coordinate a complex multi-personal enterprise, rather than the sort of full-bore collectivist analysis that some of us have gestured at.  Regular war is less evil than irregular war, but this is a distinction to tolerate, not to celebrate. I am in great sympathy with Dill’s discussion and conclusion, but might raise a couple of questions.