If this is an accurate report, it doesn't inspire confidence. According to Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris at Foreign Policy, the “migration” of targeting operations from the CIA to the Pentagon “migration of those operations has stalled, and it is now unlikely to happen anytime soon.” Such anonymously sourced reports always need to be taken with a grain...
The debate over autonomous weapons is not so visible in the United States, but the ban campaign launched by Human Rights Watch a year ago - an international NGO coalition called the "Campaign to Stop Killer Robots" - has been quite active in Europe and at the UN, where a number of countries raised the issue in their statements to...
Speeches by US officials suggest that the Administration believes that it can lawfully target people based merely on their membership in armed groups, rather than on the basis of their conduct or direct participation in hostilities. Membership in an armed group alone is not a sufficient basis to directly target an individual. (pp. 45-46, emphasis added)HRW states:
US statements and actions indicate that US forces are applying an overly broad definition of “combatant” in targeted attacks, for example by designating persons as lawful targets based on their merely being members, rather than having military operational roles, in the armed group. Individuals who accompany or support an organized armed group, but whose activities are unrelated to military operations, are not lawful military targets under the laws of war. Thus members of an armed group who play a political role or a non-military logistics function cannot be targeted on that basis alone. (p. 86, emphasis added)In contrast, Customary International Humanitarian Law states in the commentary to Rule 5 (Civilians are persons who are not members of the armed forces. The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians):
[Marty Lederman is an Associate Professor at Georgetown Law School and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010, and an Attorney Advisor in OLC from 1994-2002. Lederman and law professors David Golove and John Mikhail filed an amicus brief in Bond.] Some preliminary reactions that occurred to me as I was listening to the...
I want to point readers to the recent issue of the Berkeley Journal of International Law which contains essays from a symposium last year on my book (with John Yoo) Taming Globalization. It contains essays from Friend of Blogs Thomas Lee, Tai-Heng Cheng, as well as our own Peter Spiro. All worth checking out....
Lyle Denniston is first out of the gate with his take on the oral argument in the much-anticipated U.S. Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Bond. His general take: The argument in Bond v. U.S. (docket 12-158) reached the grand constitutional scale that has been its potential all along. At the end of an hour-long hearing, it appeared that the government might just have...
November 5, 2013 is U.S. National Treaty Day. Well, not really, but it might as well be given how much treaties are going to be in the news tomorrow. For starters, the United States Supreme Court hears oral argument in the case of Bond v. United States (for the pleadings, see SCOTUS blog's as-always-excellent round-up). As we've blogged previously (a lot), the case...
Has the federal government ever put Missouri v. Holland to work? I don't think so, though I always hesitate to state it categorically. The Supreme Court's 1920 decision in Holland squarely held that the Treaty Power adds something to other enumerated federal authorities. But there appears to be no instance in which the federal government has actually used a treaty...
The Association of Defence Counsel at the ICTY is organising a Conference on November 29 at the Bel-Air hotel in The Hague on the Legacy of the ICTY from the perspective of the Defence function. More information is here. The ASIL's International Legal Theory Interest Group and Cornell Law School are organizing an event on the Theoretical Boundaries of Armed Conflict and Human...
In my previous post, I mocked Scotland Yard's assertion that David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's partner, committed an act of terrorism by transporting documents stolen from the US government by Edward Snowden. Mockery remains the appropriate response, given the vast chasm that separates Miranda's actions from any defensible conception of terrorism -- such as the one I quoted from UN General...
No, not actual terrorism, "[c]riminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons, or particular persons for political purposes." That's still going strong. I'm talking about the concept of terrorism, which has officially lost all meaning whatsoever: British authorities claimed the domestic partner of reporter Glenn Greenwald was involved in "terrorism" when he tried to...
This week on Opinio Juris, we held a symposium on Chevron and the rise of arbitral power introduced here by Michael D. Goldhaber. Comments were by Christoph Schreuer, Anthea Roberts, and Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah. Michael's response is here. In follow up on earlier symposia, Anupam Chander posted his reply to the comments in last week's book symposium on The Electronic Silk Road and Anne van Aaken responded to...
