“The story of Ahmed Timol is rooted in our brutal past. He was not cut down on the battlefield while in the line of fire. He was detained under pernicious security laws and sadistically tortured for more than 4 days. Timol’s tormentors were police officers who were meant to serve and protect, particularly those in their care. While in an...
[Gloria Gaggioli is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the Law Faculty of the University of Geneva as well as Lecturer at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). She is specialized in international humanitarian law and human rights law. Prior to joining the University of Geneva, she served as Legal Adviser in...
On 17 May 2017, Judge Marc Perrin de Brichambaut gave a talk at Peking Law School about the role of victims at the ICC. The talk, which was recorded and then transcribed, included a number of shocking comments, such as describing "the Africans" as "a group of 54 countries who provide the suspects and the accused" to the Court. Judge...
[Aurel Sari is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter and the Director of the Exeter Centre for International Law. This post was written in a personal capacity. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] The notion that military personnel are entitled to use force in their own defence is widely accepted. However, beyond...
[Adil Ahmad Haque is Professor of Law and Judge Jon O. Newman Scholar at Rutgers Law School. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] Suppose that a soldier from State A intentionally kills a civilian in State B. Maybe State A is fighting an international armed conflict against State B. Maybe State A is fighting a non-international armed...
Erica Gaston is an international lawyer with the Global Public Policy institute (GPPi) and a non-resident fellow at the New America Foundation. She has been working in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict or post-conflict zones on the application of laws of war, human rights and other related issues since 2006. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense...
Yulia Ioffe is a DPhil (PhD) candidate in Public International Law at University of Oxford. On 21 April 2019, Ukraine held the second and the final round of its presidential elections. The new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has vowed to focus on achieving a ceasefire in an armed conflict in the East (which has claimed more than 13,000 lives) and moderating hard-line policies aimed at promoting the...
[Bruce ‘Ossie’ Oswald is Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law.This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] What follows is an outline of how the use of force in self-defence as a doctrine has evolved in UN peacekeeping operations. I focus on how the use of force...
[Colonel (retired) Randall Bagwell served 30 years as a legal advisor for the US Army, deploying on numerous operations. He is now the Director of International Humanitarian Law for the American Red Cross. Any views expressed in this paper are his personally, and should in no way be attributed to the US Army or the American Red Cross. This post...
[Camilla G. Cooper (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Operational Law at the Norwegian Defence University College. Sigrid Redse Johansen is a Judge Advocate General of the Norwegian Armed Forces. Please note that the following was written in the authors' personal capacity and is not to be considered as an official Norwegian reply to the questions posed. This post is...
[Hans Boddens Hosang is Deputy Director of Legal Affairs of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and Senior External Researcher at the Law of Armed Conflict and Military Operations (LACMO) Research Group, Amsterdam Center for International Law at the University of Amsterdam. Terry Gill is Professor of Military Law at the University of Amsterdam & the Netherlands Defence Academy and is...
[Elvina Pothelet is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva, and a teaching assistant and researcher at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] It is tempting to think of soldier self-defense as a black hole in the galaxy of international law: in the same way as black holes grow continuously by absorbing mass from their surroundings, soldier self-defense seems...