Jack Goldsmith notes at Lawfare: Last Monday Harvard Law School conferred its medal of freedom on one of its graduates, General Mark Martins, Commander of the Rule of Law Field Force -Afghanistan. The Harvard National Security Journal has just posted the speech, with slides, that General Martins gave for the occasion....
The US has now deployed armed drones over Libya, according to press reports. Drone systems have been operating as surveillance systems for weeks now, but acting on a NATO request, the US has now put up at least two weaponized drones in the Libya conflict. The logic of this move is inescapable. NATO countries launch air strikes against Libyan army assets, making...
For the students among you ramping up for your international law exams, you're probably glad that you won't have to face this kind of question (which appeared on Professor Beale's 1905 exam at Harvard Law School): Indictment for larceny. The defendant was an officer in the English army detailed to pursue a, band of Indians who had been murdering settlers in...
The Council of Europe continues to monitor death penalty practices around the world and call out friendly states that fall short of full abolition. Last week the Council passed a resolution (full text here) reiterating its support for abolition and calling on Belarus (as a potential member state), Japan and the U.S. to join the consensus of democratic, human rights...
Our friends at the International Law Association pass along the following registration information for the upcoming Asia-Pacific Conference in Taipei, which features a terrific line-up of speakersi: The 2011 International Law Association (ILA) Asia-Pacific Regional Conference will take place in Taipei, Taiwan from May 29 to June 1, 2011. The conference theme is “Contemporary International Law Issues in the Asia Pacific:...
Publicly, Israel has been nothing but critical of the Goldstone Report. Netanyahu responded to Goldstone's recent partial retraction, for example, by calling for the "twisted and nonfactual" Report to be thrown "into the dustbin of history." Behind the scenes, however, Israel has taken a different approach. According to the Jewish Press, the Report has led the IDF to adopt some very...
The San Francisco Chronicle has the story: The conference, titled "Litigating Palestine," took place at the San Francisco campus March 25 and 26. The 13 speakers - four of them Jewish, according to a school official - discussed legal issues and court cases involving Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, protests, consumer boycotts and related...
According to the Prosecutor, he needs 421 days to review 12,900 pages of documents that the Pre-Trial Chamber recently ordered him to disclose to the Ocampo Six so they can prepare for their confirmation hearings: International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has told the court he needs 421 days to review the evidence to comply with orders given last...
My school is once again advertising for new faculty at all levels, from Lecturer to Professor. Note the short deadline: applications must be in by April 27. Here is the job description: Melbourne Law School, Australia's first all-graduate law faculty, invites applications for continuing appointments from creative legal scholars committed to educational innovation. We continue to seek new colleagues at...
Sari Bashi is the Executive Director of Gisha, an Israeli NGO that protects the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. While many in the international community were unsure how to interpret Richard Goldstone's Washington Post op ed earlier this month withdrawing the allegation made in the Goldstone Report that Israel intentionally targeted civilians during the war in Gaza, within Israel,...
The U.S. has made no move to interrogate or seek custody of Indonesian militant Umar Patek since he was apprehended this year by officials in Pakistan with the help of a CIA tip, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. The little-known case highlights a sharp difference between President Obama’s counter-terrorism policy and that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The CIA is out of the detention and interrogation business,” said a U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence operations but was not authorized to speak publicly.The article goes on to discuss the policy paralysis underlying this condition. But I want to add one caution. The article says, and it has been said many times in recent years, that the lack of a detention regime gives incentives to favor targeted killing. Despite having made exactly this point myself many times, however, it bears noting that there are plenty of independent reasons for using targeted killings in many situations — avoiding detention is almost certainly far less important than the current meme suggests. Even if there were some protocol for detaining and interrogating people, there are plenty of circumstances in which seeking to capture is too risky and other operational reasons. Put another way, it's not as though people are sitting around the government all day saying, hey, here's a terrorist, we can't really capture him, so let's kill him! Some level of background incentive is there, no doubt, but it's background to a much more complicated decision-making foreground. More interesting is that the article’s main focus is on a person captured by Indonesia from a CIA tip, not targeted with a missile. Even in that case, in which it is not a choice between targeted killing and detention, the CIA still does not want custody, even though the article says that experts believe that the CIA could get far more and better information if it controlled the detention and interrogation process. This is far from an ideal situation, of course. While on the topic of targeted killing and drone warfare, let me point readers to a conference at University of Pennsylvania Law School this weekend, a joint effort among lawyers, philosophers, diplomats, and national security and military personnel. It’s an impressive lineup - including Deborah Pearlstein and John Dehn - and you can even get CLE credit, I believe. (I’ve put the announcement below the fold.) I’ll be talking at the Penn conference about an ethical tension between jus in bello and jus ad bellum. Targeted killing through drones results (I will take by assumption) in less civilian damage in the category of jus in bello. According to a common argument made today, however, that greater “efficiency” in jus in bello considerations thereby makes resort to force by the United States too easy, as a jus ad bellum matter, and indeed possibly “inefficient.” Why? According to this argument, the lack of personal risk to US personnel in drone warfare lowers to an inefficient level the disincentives upon the US to use force. I have many problems with this argument. But I do think it’s an interesting one from a philosophical perspective, because even if the jus in bello and jus ad bellum considerations are not strictly inconsistent, there is at least substantial tension between them. Moreover, the ideas of “efficiency jus in bello” and “efficiency jus ad bellum” are interesting all on their own, even if I think that particularly the idea of an efficient level of violence, or an efficient level of incentives and disincentives to resort to force, premised around personal risk to US personnel, is deeply incoherent. But the incoherency seems to me to take part in an even deeper, and still more wrong, idea that an “efficient level of resort to force” can be extracted independent of the idea of “sides” in war with incommensurate ends. I’m not a philosopher, though, and find all this philosophy stuff difficult. So I have been careful to load up my remarks with a lot of practical stuff about where, on the basis of my conversations, reading, discussions, etc., with lots of different folks, both targeted killing and drone warfare are likely to go. Since those are just my perceptions of where the technology, practices, and policies are going, there's plenty to dispute. The conference has a great lineup of experts from many fields, however — so even if my remarks are a big miss, in good conscience I can still highly recommend it to you.
