I am very rarely rendered speechless, but this appropriation of Martin Luther King by the Air Force Global Strike Command Programming Division (nearly) did the trick:

The Department of Defense is a leader in equal opportunity for all patriots seeking to serve this great nation. . . The vigilant warriors in AFGSC understand they are all equal and unified in purpose to provide a safe, secure and effective deterrent force for the United States. . .

Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team – comprised of Airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion – standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense. . . Our team must overlook our differences to ensure perfection as we maintain and operate our weapon systems. . . Maintaining our commitment to our Global Strike team, our families and our nation is a fitting tribute to Dr. King as we celebrate his legacy.

It is a wonderful thing that the US military is desegregated.  And the military deserves credit for so rapidly adjusting to the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  But to say that maintaining the strength of the US military is a “fitting tribute” to Dr. King is simply perverse. I can’t do better than Glenn Greenwald, who wrote a great post yesterday about the phenomenal speech Dr. King gave at Riverside Church in NYC on 4 April 1967 condemning US militarism and advocating refusal to serve in the military.  I’ll simply offer a few paragraphs from the speech about the US’s “liberation” of Vietnam…

A few days ago, I criticized Judge Pohl’s rejection of al-Nashiri’s claim that there was no armed conflict between the US and al-Qaeda at the time of the acts alleged in his indictment — such as the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 – thereby depriving the military commission of jurisdiction over those acts.  Judge Pohl’s decision relied almost exclusively on two facts: (1) Congress enacted, and Obama signed, the Military Commissions Act of 2009, which gave the commissions jurisdiction over acts committed prior to 9/11; and (2) the government referred charges against al-Nashiri knowing full well that the acts in question took place prior to 9/11.  Those facts, according to Judge Pohl, suffice to establish that there was an armed conflict between al-Qaeda and the US at the time of al-Nashiri’s acts.

As I explained in the post, Judge Pohl’s argument doesn’t make sense on its own terms.  But I think there is an even deeper problem with the decision: it conflicts with Hamdan II, in which the D.C. Circuit rejected the government’s claim that material support for terrorism (MST) was a war crime.  Central to that decision was the D.C. Circuit’s insistence that the military commissions can only prosecute acts that qualify as war crimes under the international law of war; whether they are war crimes under the so-called “U.S. common law of war” is irrelevant:

Third, and perhaps most to the point, [the Government's] cases do not establish that material support for terrorism was a war crime recognized under international law as of 1996 to 2001 when Hamdan committed his conduct, which is the relevant inquiry under 10 U.S.C. § 821. The Government contends that those Civil War precedents illuminate what it calls the “U.S. common law of war” – not the international law of war. But the statutory constraint here imposed by 10 U.S.C. § 821 is the international law of war. As the Government told the Supreme Court in Quirin, “This ‘common law of war’ is a centuries-old body of largely unwritten rules and principles of international law which governs the behavior of both soldiers and civilians during time of war.” Brief for the United States at 29, in Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (emphasis added) (citation omitted). To be sure, U.S.precedents may inform the content of international law. But those Civil War precedents fail to establish material support for terrorism as a war crime under the international law of war as of 1996 to 2001. And even the Government admits that material support for terrorism was not an international-law war crime as of 1996 to 2001.

In short, material support for terrorism was not an international-law war crime under 10 U.S.C. § 821 at the time Hamdan engaged in the relevant conduct.

Here is my question: doesn’t the D.C. Circuit’s insistence in Hamdan II that the criminality of conduct must be determined according to the international law of war contradict Judge Pohl’s conclusion in al-Nashiri that Congress and the President have the authority to determine the existence of armed conflict?  The idea that the existence of armed conflict is determined by the subjective perceptions of the fighting parties is foreign to IHL; indeed, the modern view — encapsulated in the ICTY’s seminal decision in Tadic – is predicated on the idea that the existence of armed conflict is a purely objective question, one determined by the facts on the ground, irrespective of the subjective perception of the parties to the hostilities.  Under the international law of war, in other words, states and non-state actors don’t decide when they are engaged in an armed conflict; the hostilities themselves make that decision for them.

Given Hamdan II, I don’t see how Judge Pohl’s decision in al-Nashiri can be sustained.  The existence of armed conflict is an essential element of every war crime; an act that takes place outside of armed conflict may violate a state’s domestic criminal law, but it does not violate IHL. So if the military commissions have jurisdiction only over acts that violate “the international law of war,” they do not have jurisdiction over acts that took place during hostilities that do not satisfy the Tadic test.  And that is true regardless of the US’s subjective perceptions of its “armed conflict” with al-Qaeda.

I have no idea whether the DC Circuit, if presented with the question, would be true to its own principles and apply Hamdan II to al-Nashiri.  I am also far from confident that the DC Circuit would apply Tadic correctly and conclude that there was no armed conflict between the US and al-Qaeda at the time of al-Nashiri’s acts.  But if I were al-Nashiri’s lawyers, I’d raise the issue as soon as I could.

Okay, I’m exaggerating.  But only slightly.  As Wells Bennett notes today at Lawfare, Judge Pohl has rejected al-Nashiri’s contention that the US and al-Qaeda were not engaged in hostilities (an armed conflict in IHL terms) at the time of the acts alleged in his indictment — primarily the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 – thereby depriving the military commission of jurisdiction over those acts. I have explained before (see here and here) why al-Nashiri’s argument is correct. Unfortunately, but completely unsurprisingly, Judge Pohl disagrees.  It is worth examining his four-page decision in detail, because it illustrates why the military commissions are so deeply and irremediably flawed.

Here is the first substantive paragraph:

Whether hostilities existed on the date  of the acts alleged to have been committed by the accused is as much a function of the nature of hostilities as any particular legally significant act by either the legislative or executive branches of government. Whether hostilities existed on the dates of the charged offenses necessarily is a fact-bound determination; moreover, whether a state of hostilities existed is as much a function of the will of the organization to which the accused is alleged to belong to as the U.S. government. In determining whether hostilities exist or do not exist, the enemy gets a vote.[1] Whether Al Qaeda, the organization of unprivileged enemy belligerents to which the accused is alleged to be a member, considered itself to be at war with the United States on the date of the alleged law of war violations is a factor among many to be considered by the trier of fact and is as relevant as any judgments made or withheld by the President or the Congress.

This is patently incorrect.  Whether a state is engaged in an armed conflict with a non-state actor is a purely factual determination, one that depends (sound familiar?) on the organization of the non-state actor and the intensity of hostilities between the non-state actor and the state.  Full stop. Whether a non-state actor believes it is “at war” with a state is irrelevant to that determination; it is not “a factor among many.”

But perhaps Judge Pohl is aware of legal precedent that I’m not.  After all, he footnotes his claim! So let’s see what the footnote says (emphasis mine):

“In connection with the plan of a campaign we shall hereafter examine more closely into the meaning of disarming a nation, but here we must at once draw a distinction between three things, which as three general objects comprise  everything else within them. They are the military power, the country, and the will of the enemy. The military power must be destroyed, that is, reduced to such a state as not to be able to prosecute the war. This is the sense in which we wish to be understood hereafter, whenever we use the expression “destruction of the enemy’s military power.” The country must be conquered, for out of the country a new military force may be formed. But if even both these things are done, still the war, that is, the hostile feeling and action of hostile agencies, cannot be considered as at an end as long as the will of the enemy is not subdued also…” Carl von Clausewitz, On War Book I Chapter 2 (1832) (emphasis added). In other words, whether the enemy has the will to make war is determinative of whether hostilities begin to exist, continue to exist, or have been terminated.

Yes, indeed: Judge Pohl’s only citation for the idea that a non-state actor can declare war against a state is an 1832 quote from Clausewitz about conflicts between states.  Had he chosen to do so, of course, Judge Pohl could have provided a slightly more relevant — and slightly more recent — citation, such as Quincy Wright’s widely-accepted conclusion that insurgents, “not being recognized states, have no power to convert a state of peace into a state of war.  So their declaration or recognition of war would have no legal effect.”  Judge Pohl must have missed that one.

Onward to the next paragraph…

[Peter Margulies is a Professor of Law at the Roger Williams University School of Law focusing on the balance of liberty, equality and security in counter-terrorism, and author of Law's Detour: Justice Displaced in the Bush Administration (NYU Press 2010).]

The days of Donald Rumsfeld chiding “Old Europe” are gone, but targeted killing has renewed debate on counter-terrorism strategies between the US and Europe.  Boundaries of the Battlefield, a symposium sponsored last week by The Hague’s Asser Institute and coordinated by Asser researcher and Opinio Juris contributor Jessica Dorsey, offered an opportunity to explore those differences and find common ground.  The symposium, co-sponsored by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, IHCL Platform, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, City of The Hague, and the Dutch Foreign Ministry, was especially valuable against the backdrop of former UK Legal Adviser Daniel Bethlehem’s new AJIL piece (see Ashley’s discussion here) on self-defense against non-state actors.  This first post will flag the debate at the conference on targeted killing and what Ken Anderson has called “naked self-defense.” A second post will analyze another issue that has roiled relations between the US and its allies: the clash between the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and international human rights law (IHRL).

The targeted killing debate started with law on the initiation of hostilities, aka the jus ad bellum.  In Daniel Webster’s 1841 Caroline formulation, the use of force in self-defense requires an imminent threat.  A number of conference participants, supporting the position taken by Bethlehem, favored a broad view of imminence.  I argued that the agility and clandestine nature of terrorist groups precluded waiting until the precise moment before an expected attack.  Rather, responses to violent non-state actors may appropriately trade off imminence and probability, intervening at an earlier stage to address what Chris Slobogin has called the…

Jennifer Daskal (who, I’m delighted to say, has just accepted an offer to join the faculty at my school, Washington College of Law) has an important op-ed in the New York Times today titled, simply, “Don’t Close Guantanamo.”  Many of us know Jen Daskal from her earlier positions in the Obama administration Justice Department and, before that, Human Rights Watch – where these were her issues.  So why not close Guantanamo?  Her core point hinges on the notion of deeming an end to the conflict in a legal sense – the conflict as defined under the AUMF – as highlighted by just-stepped-down Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson in one of his final speeches:

The political reality is that closure of Guantánamo is unlikely to happen anytime soon, and if it did, it would do more harm than good. We should instead focus on finding places to transfer those cleared to leave the facility and, more important, on defining the end to the war.

In a recent speech, Jeh Johnson, then the Department of Defense general counsel, discussed a future “tipping point” at which Al Qaeda would be so decimated that the armed conflict would be deemed over. Statements from high level officials suggest that this point may be near. And as the United States pulls out of Afghanistan, there is an increasingly strong argument that the war against Al Qaeda is coming to a close. With the end of the conflict, the legal justification for the detentions will finally disappear.

At that point, the remaining men in Guantánamo can no longer be held without charge, at least not without running afoul of basic constitutional and international law prohibitions. Only then is there a realistic hope for meaningful closure, not by recreating a prison in the United States but through the arduous process of transferring, releasing or prosecuting the detainees left there.

In the meantime, we should keep Guantánamo open.

Framed against the idea that a formal legal end to the conflict might be forthcoming sooner rather than later, Daskal’s arguments for not closing it now seem much less an about-face than the op-ed title might suggest.  The argument is essentially strategic as a matter of timing; far from giving up on closing Guantanamo, it argues that the legal timing matters quite a lot to actually getting there. Given that, I’m not sure there’s that much daylight between her position and Deborah’s, for example, in relation to Deborah’s comments on this same Jeh Johnson speech. But as Ben Wittes notes at Lawfare, this is a brave move by Daskal, given the world from which she comes:

[T]he truth is that the argument is different coming from Jen, a committed human rights advocate, than coming from [Wittes]. The human rights movement has been rigidly and dogmatically—and irrationally—dug in on this matter. And very few people have had the guts to state simply that given the way things have played out, Guantanamo’s closure isn’t the ideal outcome. If the administration could come to where Jen has come here, significant policy opportunities for a different relationship with Congress over detention would open up. It’s great that Jen is willing to say in public that the emperor has no clothes.

The basic debate here will gradually turn (I believe Daskal is right to suggest) and hinge on the meaning of the end of the conflict. At this point, what we have in the way of administration statements on this is Jeh Johnson’s somewhat delphic speech – it has something on which everyone can hang their hat if they want to.  That is not a failing of the speech, to be clear – it had to be hedged in many ways (and Jack Goldsmith has commented on many of them).  It is far from insignificant, as I remarked at Lawfare when the speech was first delivered, to recognize the possibility of an end to the conflict and to begin cautiously to lay out the general conditions for it and what they mean in legal terms.

Still, no one should think they can know today when that point will come and exactly how it will be defined, either as a general proposition or in the factual circumstances as they develop; Johnson was explicit about this.  A lot of what is being said in commentary on this is less analysis, however, than lobbying on exactly this issue.  But consider how wide the gaps are between declaring an end to the conflict in a legal sense, and stating precisely and concretely what that means.  One the one hand, the speech talked about the end of the conflict and the importance of defining its meaning in legal terms.  On the other hand, it recognized with respect to detention that there would be people who might never be tried or released, and it cautiously hinted at legal reasons that might cover this.

Moreover, it was also clear in Johnson’s speech that an end to the conflict, in the US legal view, would not thereby terminate the US’s legal authorities to use force abroad, in targeted killing or other operations. Those legal justifications might shift or be articulated differently in both international and domestic law terms.  But whether in relation to on-going threats that might be put under the AUMF (arising from actors that might or might not be characterized as “affiliated” forces with Al Qaeda), or in relation to brand new kinds of threats, the end of the conflict would not be seen as somehow shutting down the President’s authority to engage in self-defense actions.  Johnson’s speech was enormously important, but mainly it quite deliberately (and correctly) raised questions of law and policy rather than answering them.

In that regard, Daskal’s op-ed, while heretical on the surface, actually laid down a strategic marker to challenge the administration to go ahead and find a way to declare the conflict legally over – and to figure out what it thinks that would mean in legal terms for detainees at Guantanamo. Daskal laid down that marker with a strong inflection that the end of the conflict would be the basis for closing Guantanamo, and would put the necessity of that closure on a far firmer footing, both legally and politically.

In the comments to my first post on the ICC and retroactive jurisdiction, Johnboy4546 suggested that the Palestinians might self-refer only the situation in the West Bank to the Court.  Such a referral would have two clear advantages for the Palestinians: (1) it would prevent the OTP from investigating Hamas’s rocket attacks, which are almost always launched from Gaza, as well as crimes committed by Fatah-related groups in Gaza (such as the murder of civilians); and (2) Israel would be extremely unlikely to prosecute the crime the Palestinians would want the OTP to investigate in the West Bank, the direct or indirect transfer of the civilian population into occupied territory, thereby ensuring that Israel could not take advantage of the Rome Statute’s principle of complementarity.

It’s a creative suggestion — and one that I’ve been hearing with increasing regularity from people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.  (I’ve just returned from a wonderful conference in Tel Aviv, a trip that included giving three different presentations in one day — a new record for me.)  But would such a geographically-limited self-referral be possible?

On balance, I don’t think so.  There is no question that a state can self-refer crimes committed on a portion of its territory; that is how the ICC treated Uganda’s referral of the situation in Northern Uganda.  (Uganda only referred crimes committed by the LRA, but the Court recharacterized that self-referral on the ground that Article 14(1) of the Rome Statute limits states to referring “situations.”)  The Security Council also limited its Sudan referral to crimes committed in Darfur.  Those referrals would seem to suggest that Palestine could refer only the situation in the West Bank to the Court.  (I am assuming for sake of argument that the Palestinian state includes both West Bank and Gaza.)

The problem is that such a geographically-limited referral would frustrate the spirit, if not the letter, of Article 14(1).  As is widely acknowledged, the drafters limited Article 14(1) to situations precisely to prevent states from using referrals to target their political opponents.  (A legitimate fear, as Uganda’s original self-referral indicates.)  By requiring states to refer situations instead of cases, Article 14(1) ensures that the OTP will always be able to investigate crimes committed by both parties to a conflict.

And therein lies the problem with a hypothetical West Bank referral. Such a referral would obviously be designed to enable the Court to investigate crimes committed by Israel while preventing it from investigating crimes committed by Hamas.  Functionally, then, a West Bank referral would be no different than Uganda’s self-referral of the LRA’s crimes.  The Court would be very unlikely to accept such a referral simply because it was framed in geographic terms.  After all, Uganda could have referred only those parts of Uganda in which the LRA operated instead of specifically — and clumsily — targeting the LRA. I doubt that the Court would have permitted Uganda to accomplish indirectly what it could not accomplish directly.

Nor is that all: even if the Court would be willing to accept a West Bank referral, Palestine might find it difficult to prevent the OTP from investigating its own crimes.  To begin with, the OTP could simply decline to investigate a referral that was limited to the West Bank — on the basis of either insufficient gravity or the “interests of justice” —  and then use its proprio motu powers to initiate a broader investigation.  I’m skeptical that the current OTP would be foolish enough to conduct any investigation into one of the most politicized conflicts in history.  But if it did, it would certainly not be foolish enough to investigate only one side of that conflict.

Moreover, it is not clear that an investigation into the West Bank would preclude the OTP from investigating crimes committed in Gaza.  In Mbarushimana, the defendant argued that because the DRC’s self-referral was limited to crimes committed in the Ituri region, the Court did not have jurisdiction over the crimes he allegedly committed in North and South Kivu.  The Pre-Trial Chamber rejected that argument on the ground that, in fact, the DRC had not limited its self-referral to Ituri.  But it also suggested — obliquely — that, had the referral been so geographically limited, the Court might still have had jurisdiction over at least some acts committed outside of Ituri.  Consider the following paragraphs (emphasis added):

16. The issue at stake is to determine whether the facts underlying the charges brought by the Prosecutor against Mr Mbarushimana can be said not to exceed the territorial, temporal and possibly personal parameters defining the situation under investigation. More specifically, according to the test developed by the Chamber in the present case, it is required that the crimes referred to in the Prosecutor’s application for a warrant of arrest for Mr Mbarushimana occurred in the context of the ongoing situation of crisis that triggered the jurisdiction of the Court through the Referral by the DRC. As already clarified by the Chamber, such a situation can include not only crimes that had already been or were being committed at the time of the referral, but also crimes committed after that time, in so far as they are sufficiently linked to the situation of crisis which was ongoing at the time of the referral.

21. The Chamber takes note of the DRC Observations, clarifying that; in submitting the Referral, the competent authorities did not intend to limit the Court’s jurisdiction to one or more particular provinces within its territory. As already determined by the Chamber, the territorial and temporal scope of a situation is to be inferred from the analysis of the situation of crisis that triggered the jurisdiction of the Court through the referral. Crimes committed after the referral can fall within the jurisdiction of the Court when sufficiently linked to that particular situation of crisis.

Although far from the picture of clarity, these paragraphs seem to imply that the Court’s understanding of the situation underlying a state’s self-referral is more important than the specific parameters of the referral itself.  As long as there is a sufficient nexus between a particular crime and the facts that motivated the state to refer the situation in question, the Court has jurisdiction over that crime.

I don’t want to push that interpretation too strongly.  The PTC’s comment regarding territorial jurisdiction was dicta, given how it construed the DRC’s self-referral.  But the rationale is the same for both temporal and territorial jurisdiction: states should not be able to craft self-referrals that prevent the Court from exercising jurisdiction over crimes that, in an objective analysis, really do fall within the parameters of the situation in question.  That principle explains why Uganda could not self-refer only the LRA’s crimes to the Court — and it explains why Palestine should not be able to impose geographic restrictions on a situation that would effectively limit the OTP to investigating crimes committed by Israel.

I had an interesting — and respectful — disagreement with André de Hoogh last week concerning the right of non-states parties to retroactively accept the jurisdiction of the Court pursuant to Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute.  I argued in my post that Palestine could accept the Court’s jurisdiction retroactive to whenever it became a state under international law.  Andre challenged that claim in the comments, arguing that “[i]n view of the clear intention expressed in article 11(2) to grant the Court only prospective jurisdiction in regard to members, there is no compelling reason or rationale to judge this issue differently for non-members under article 12(3).”

As if on cue, the Appeals Chamber has just weighed in on the retroactivity issue in the context of Cote d’Ivoire’s ad hoc acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction under Article 12(3).  Cote d’Ivoire filed its Article 12(3) declaration on 18 April 2003 but accepted the Court’s jurisdiction retroactive to 19 September 2002.  Laurent Gbagbo later challenged the temporal scope of the declaration, arguing that it applied only retroactively — that it gave the Court jurisdiction over events that occurred between 19 September 2002 and 18 April 2003, but not over events that occurred subsequent to 18 April 2003.  (Which would obviously mean the Court did not have jurisdiction over the crimes with which he is charged.)  The Appeals Chamber rejected that argument, and in doing so it made clear that Article 12(3) permits non-member states to accept the Court’s jurisdiction both retroactively and prospectively:

According to Enough!, the OTP is investigating the actions of M23 and “other parties” in the DRC:

In the aftermath of the March 23 Movement, or M23, seizure of Goma, the International Criminal Court, or ICC,Chief Prosecutor Fatoua Bensouda announced that her office is investigating “allegations of ICC crimes by members and leaders of M23, and by other parties taking advantage of the chaos in the region.” While documenting the M23′s crimes is undeniably important, a robust ICC investigation into the other actors responsible for international crimes being committed across eastern Congo could provide much needed leverage to the international community as it seeks to broker peace in the troubled region.

It seems highly likely that the “other parties” in question are Rwandan military and political officials, who — according to the UN – have “created, equipped, trained, advised, reinforced and directly commanded the M23 rebellion.”  Indeed, the UN believes that a Rwandan general, Gen. Emmanuel Ruvusha, personally directed M23′s recent capture of Goma.

It is probably too much to ask for the ICC to bring charges against Kagame for his support of M23. Nevertheless, charges against senior Rwandan military officers would go a long way toward dispelling Kagame’s carefully-cultivated image as a positive force in Rwanda and the region. I doubt anyone in the region takes that myth seriously, but Kagame still has many credulous supporters in the West.

That said, the ranks of Kagame supporters are thinning.  The UK just announced that it is suspending £21m in aid to Rwanda because of concerns about its actions in the DRC.

In my essay on signature strikes, I criticize (and I’m not alone) the U.S. practice of considering military-age males in an area of known terrorist activity to be lawful targets.  That signature, however, pales in comparison to the possibility that the U.S. is targeting “children with potential hostile intent,” as well:

The US military is facing fresh questions over its targeting policy in Afghanistan after a senior army officer suggested that troops were on the lookout for “children with potential hostile intent”.

In comments which legal experts and campaigners described as “deeply troubling”, Army Lt Col Marion Carrington told the Marine Corp Times that children, as well as “military-age males”, had been identified as a potential threat because some were being used by the Taliban to assist in attacks against Afghan and coalition forces.

“It kind of opens our aperture,” said Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

In the article, headlined “Some Afghan kids aren’t bystanders”, Carrington referred to a case this year in which the Afghan national police in Kandahar province said they found children helping insurgents by carrying soda bottles full of potassium chlorate.

IHL does not limit the use of lethal force to adults, so a child can be lawfully targeted at any time if he is a member of an organized armed group (by assuming a continuous combat function in it) or for the duration of his participation if he directly participates in hostilities.  That said, because it is unlikely that the U.S. tracks individual children long enough to establish their continuous combat function, the “potential hostile intent” signature is deeply problematic.  ”Hostile intent” does not make a civilian (adult or child) targetable; that intent must be manifested in acts that qualify as direct participation.  And the word “potential” seems to indicate that the U.S. feels free to target children at times when they are not directly participating in hostilities (otherwise they would be manifesting “actual” hostile intent).

Many questions, of course, remain.  It is unclear whether the U.S. is actually targeting children with “potential hostile intent.”  It is also unclear how the U.S. understands “hostile intent” and “potential.” But it doesn’t take an IHL expert to know that targeting children with potential hostile intent creates significant cause for concern.

A number of commentators have challenged my claim that Articles 11(2) and 12(3) of the Rome Statute would permit Palestine to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction retroactively, whether as a member-state or on an ad hoc basis. Here, for example, is what my friend Jennifer Trahan wrote yesterday at IntLawGrrls:

Even if an entity becomes a “state,” should there be jurisdiction that it can invoke back to a time when (a) there were no clear “nationals” of that state, and (b) there was no clear “territory” of that state, and in fact, even according to the General Assembly there was only an “observer” and not a “state”? (The ICC Office of the Prosecutor has already declined to exercise jurisdiction over this time-period once before.)

Let’s not get carried away here.

I realize that I should have been more precise in my previous post. I was trying to make a more modest point: namely, that the Rome Statute does, in fact, permit retroactive acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction. I did not mean to imply that Palestine itself could necessarily accept jurisdiction over acts committed on its territory before it became a state. Mea culpa.

That said, I think Jennifer makes an equally problematic assumption: that Palestine only became a state on Thursday, as a result of the UNGA vote. As Bill Schabas reminds us, membership in the UN may be relevant to whether an entity qualifies as a state, but it is not dispositive…

In the wake of today’s long-overdue vote to upgrade Palestine to observer-state status, there seems to be persistent confusion concerning what would happen if Palestine ratified the Rome Statute. In particular, a number of commentators seem to think that it is unclear whether the ICC would have jurisdiction over crimes committed prior to Palestine’s ratification. (See Colum Lynch at FP, for example.) In fact, the Rome Statute leaves no doubt whatsoever that Palestine could (but would not be required to) accept the Court’s jurisdiction retroactive to 1 July 2002, the date the Rome Statute entered into force. The relevant provisions are Articles 11(2) and 12(3) (emphasis added):

11(2): If a State becomes a Party to this Statute after its entry into force, the Court may exercise its jurisdiction only with respect to crimes committed after the entry into force of this Statute for that State, unless that State has made a declaration under article 12, paragraph 3.

12(3): If the acceptance of a State which is not a Party to this Statute is required under paragraph 2, that State may, by declaration lodged with the Registrar, accept the exercise of jurisdiction by the Court with respect to the crime in question. The accepting State shall cooperate with the Court without any delay or exception in accordance with Part 9.

Though not the picture of drafting clarity, the two provisions make clear (1) the default position is that the ICC will have jurisdiction only over crimes committed after a state ratifies the Rome Statute, but (2) the state in question may file a declaration with the Registrar accepting the Court’s jurisdiction retroactively.

It is worth noting that Palestine would not have to ratify the Rome Statute to refer the situation in Gaza to the ICC. It could also accept the Court’s jurisdiction on an ad hoc basis, pursuant to Article 12(3). And it could do so retroactively, as the Cote d’Ivoire precedent indicates. (Cote d’Ivore, a non-member state, accepted the Court’s jurisdiction on 18 April 2003 retroactive to 19 September 2002.)

Finally, I’ll say it once again: Palestine should be careful what it wishes for. I think it is highly likely that, if the OTP investigated the situation in Gaza, Palestinians would end up in the dock long before Israelis. From a legal perspective, Fatou Bensouda would find it much easier to prosecute Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians than Israel’s disproportionate attacks, collective punishment of Palestinians, and transfer of its civilians into occupied territory. The latter crimes are fraught with ambiguity and difficult to prove. I know I wouldn’t start with them, were I the Prosecutor.

I blogged late last year about the UK Court of Appeal’s judgment in Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs v. Rahmatullah, which implicitly repudiated a little-known OLC memo written by Jack Goldsmith that concluded “operatives of international terrorist organizations” are not “protected persons” for purposes of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention — a provision that prohibits “[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not… regardless of motive.”  The UK Supreme Court issued its judgment in the case yesterday.  Unlike the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected Goldsmith’s argument:

33.    Mr Eadie pointed out, however, that the same opinion from Mr Goldsmith expressed the unequivocal view that Al-Qaeda operatives found in occupied Iraq are excluded from “protected person” status. That opinion seems to have been based on a narrow interpretation of the qualifying phrase “find themselves” as applied to those who come to be in Iraq at the material time. The presence of such as Mr Rahmatullah in Iraq could not, Mr Goldsmith suggests, be attributed to happenstance or coincidence. He was therefore not a protected person under the convention.

34.    It is not necessary to deal with this argument, although, if it were, I would have little hesitation in dismissing it. To make happenstance or coincidence a prerequisite of protection seems to me to introduce a wholly artificial and unwarranted restriction on its availability under the convention. But, in any event, the position of the UK government, as evidenced by the Joint Service Manual, is plainly at odds with the stance taken by the US as to the application of GC4 to members of Al-Qaeda. This is confirmed by a statement in a report by Intelligence and Security Committee on The Handling of Detainees by UK Intelligence Personnel in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq: (2005) Cm 6469. At para 8 of that report it is stated that, “the UK regards all personnel captured in Afghanistan as protected by the Geneva Conventions”. Against this background it is simply not open to the Secretaries of State to suggest that the convention does not apply on the basis that Mr Goldsmith has advanced.

35.    Given that GC4 does apply to Mr Rahmatullah, how does that bear on the legality of his detention? Article 49 forbids the forcible transfer of protected persons from the occupied territory, in this case Iraq. It provides: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

36.    The, presumably forcible, transfer of Mr Rahmatullah from Iraq to Afghanistan is, at least prima facie, a breach of article 49. On that account alone, his continued detention post-transfer is unlawful.

Rahmatullah continues to be detained by the U.S. — illegally, as the U.K.’s highest court has now made clear.