In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

17 Jul

On Wednesday, a Dutch Court handed down a hotly anticipated decision on the Mothers of Srebrenica case, finding the Dutch state responsible for the deaths of 300 people who were sheltering with Dutchbat in July 1995, when the safe haven at Srebrenica fell.  The English translation is available here. This ruling means the relatives of those 300 Bosniaks will be entitled...

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16 Jul

There are many dads who have played make-believe with their little girls, perhaps taking the part of kindly king to his daughter's princess.  Not many people have turned this game into an international legal incident concerning state formation.  But  at least one man has. According to the Washington Post:
Jeremiah Heaton was playing with his daughter in their Abingdon, Va., home last winter when she asked whether she could be a real princess. Heaton, a father of three who works in the mining industry, didn’t want to make any false promises to Emily, then 6, who was “big on being a princess.” But he still said yes. “As a parent you sometimes go down paths you never thought you would,” Heaton said. Within months, Heaton was journeying through the desolate southern stretches of Egypt and into an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert. There, on June 16 — Emily’s seventh birthday — he planted a blue flag with four stars and a crown on a rocky hill. The area, a sandy expanse sitting along the Sudanese border, morphed from what locals call Bir Tawil into what Heaton and his family call the “Kingdom of North Sudan.” There, Heaton is the self-described king and Emily is his princess.
Wow. Heaton just upped the ante for all non-royal dads. The Washington Post also reports:
Heaton says his claim over Bir Tawil is legitimate. He argues that planting the flag — which his children designed — is exactly how several other countries, including what became the United States, were historically claimed. The key difference, Heaton said, is that those historical cases of imperialism were acts of war while his was an act of love. “I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” Heaton said.
That’s sweet. Really. But let’s turn to the international legal argument…
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14 Jul

Professor Yann-huei Song of the Academia Sinica here in Taipei has notified me of the recent passing of his friend and fellow Law of the Sea scholar William T. Burke of the University of Washington.  His Seattle Times obituary is here.  Professor Burke's academic publications included The Public Order of the Oceans (coauthored with Myres S. McDougal), published in 1962 and revised...

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14 Jul

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa In Nigeria, Boko Haram-style violence radiates southwards. Ebola continues to spread in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, with a combined 44 new cases and 21 deaths between July 6 and 8, the World Health Organisation has said. Asia North Korea has fired artillery shells into waters near its sea border with South Korea,...

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12 Jul

This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a symposium on Ian Henderson and Bryan Cavanagh's paper on Military Members Claiming Self-Defence during Armed Conflict. In a first post, Ian and Bryan discussed when self-defence applies during an armed conflict, while their second post dealt with collateral damage and "precautions in attack". Their third post addressed prohibited weapons, obedience to lawful commands, and a ‘duty’...

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11 Jul

[Kinga Tibori-Szabó currently works for the Legal Representative of Victims at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. She is also a New York attorney. In 2012, she won the ASIL Lieber Prize for her book Anticipatory Action in Self-Defence.] What could be more straightforward than a unit commander’s right to defend his unit, or other specified units against hostile acts and hostile intent?...

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11 Jul

[Ian Henderson is a group captain in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as the Director Military Law Centre and Deputy-Director Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. Bryan Cavanagh is a squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as a legal training officer at the Military Law Centre and Asia-Pacific Centre for Military...

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10 Jul

[Ian Henderson is a group captain in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as the Director Military Law Centre and Deputy-Director Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. Bryan Cavanagh is a squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as a legal training officer at the Military Law Centre and Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. This note was written in their personal capacities and does not necessarily represent the views of the Australian Government or the Australian Department of Defence. This is the third in a four-part series. The first post can be found here (along with a response here) and the second post here.] This is the third in a series of four posts that address the relationship between self-defence and LOAC.  In this post we compare how LOAC and the law of self-defence deal with a number of discrete issues like use of prohibited weapons, obedience to lawful commands, and a ‘duty’ to retreat. It also provides a table which summarises the main points in the first three posts. Can you use a poisoned bullet to protect yourself in self-defence? The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) prohibits the use of certain weapons. Under the Rome Statute and the Australian Commonwealth Criminal Code, it is a war crime to employ poison or poisoned weapons, prohibited gases, or prohibited bullets.In contrast, the law of self-defence does not specifically address the means of response to a threat, but rather merely requires the response to be necessary, reasonable and proportional. Under the Australian Criminal Code and the Rome Statute, there is no limitation on pleading self-defence only to crimes relating to the use of force. Therefore, the use of a prohibited weapon would be consistent with self-defence analysed under the Australian Criminal Code and the Rome Statute provided that a person’s actions were a necessary, reasonable and proportionate response to the threat. In some jurisdictions, for example New Zealand, self-defence operates to exclude criminal responsibility for use of force. It is possible in these jurisdictions a combatant could not successfully plead self-defence in relation to weapons offences which are separate and distinct to offences relating to the actual use of force. We did not come to any conclusion on this issue. Nowhere to run Under LOAC, not unsurprisingly there is no requirement to retreat from an attack. The position under self-defence varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We found Leverick’s categorisation of the different approaches useful:
a) An absolute retreat rule. The accused must make an attempt to retreat before using force in self-defence regardless of the circumstances. b) A strong retreat rule. The accused must make an attempt to retreat before using force in self-defence only if an opportunity to do so actually exists. c) A weak retreat rule. Retreat is not treated as an independent variable, but rather as one factor that is taken into account in deciding whether the accused’s actions were necessary or reasonable. d) No retreat rule. There is no duty on the accused to take an opportunity to retreat. The victim of an attack has the right to stand their ground and meet force with force.
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08 Jul

[Jens David Ohlin is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.] Ian Henderson and Bryan Cavanagh have hit the nail on the head in identifying a crucial and under-theorized question that goes right to the basic structure of the laws of war. I am in complete agreement that invocations of self-defense during armed conflict are both confused and confusing. There is already the frequent problem of conflating individual self-defense (in the criminal law sense) with collective self-defense (jus ad bellum and article 51 of the UN Charter).  In addition, one often hears talk of a soldier’s right of self-defense – a claim that is mostly redundant since soldiers hold the privilege of combatancy and have no need to invoke a separate justification for their behavior. A justification like self-defense serves to negate the wrongdoing of the act, but a privileged soldier who kills a legitimate target has committed no wrongful act that requires negating.  Consequently, the justification of self-defense is only relevant during armed conflict when the defender is unprivileged, such as a civilian who has no right to participate in armed conflict.  If the civilian is challenged by an enemy combatant who refuses to obey the principle of distinction, then the civilian is entitled to kill the soldier in self-defense. If a soldier is attacked by a civilian, the soldier can legitimately kill the civilian because he is directly participating in hostilities; no claim of self-defense is required because the privilege applies. Understanding self-defense from a civilian’s perspective is more difficult.  Consider the complicated problem of a civilian who kills an enemy soldier who is in the process of killing the civilian as collateral damage during a lawful attack against a military objective. In that scenario, does the civilian have the right of self-defense? In the criminal law we usually view the right of self-defense as only applicable against unlawful attacks, but in this case the attacking soldier’s original assault is lawful under LOAC as long as the anticipated collateral damage is not disproportionate to the value of the military objective. If the envisioned collateral damage is disproportionate, then the attack is unlawful.  So, in that case, the right of the civilian to exercise self-defense would depend entirely on the civilian making the correct assessment of not only the collateral damage, but also the anticipated collateral damage viewed -- not from his perspective – but rather from the perspective of the person attacking him!  A greater conceptual riddle I cannot fathom.  This would be a nightmare for a criminal court, international or domestic, to adjudicate. The deeper issue imbedded in Henderson and Cavanaugh’s research is the application of the privilege of combatancy to non-international armed conflicts.  The standard textbook answer is that the privilege is inapplicable to NIAC because the very concept of “combatant” is part of the legal architecture of IAC.  Under this view, a NIAC can only have government forces and rebels – never combatants per se. To my mind, this statement is often reflexively repeated in the literature without due consideration for whether it is always and universally true.  Few individuals have challenged it, though Henderson himself is one of the few to have seriously studied the issue, writing articles suggesting that government forces in NIACs are privileged belligerents and that prosecuting them domestically would violate the laws of war.  Henderson is to be commended for tackling an understudied but vital topic.
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08 Jul

[Ian Henderson is a group captain in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as the Director Military Law Centre and Deputy-Director Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. Bryan Cavanagh is a squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as a legal training officer at the Military Law Centre and Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. This note was written in their personal capacities and does not necessarily represent the views of the Australian Government or the Australian Department of Defence.] We would like to thank the editors of Opinio Juris for allowing us this opportunity to discuss our draft book chapter on the how the concept of self-defence under criminal law operates in relation to military members during an armed conflict. We would also like to thank the ASIL Lieber Society and the judges who kindly awarded our paper a Certificate of Merit (second prize) in the 2014 Richard R. Baxter Military Prize for ‘a paper that significantly enhances the understanding and implementation of the law of war’. The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) reflects a balance between military necessity and humanity. Potentially upsetting this balance is an apparent trend towards relying on self-defence under criminal law as a justification for the use of force by military members during armed conflicts. We argue that this trend is based on a misunderstanding of the scope self-defence when applied in light of the combatant’s privilege. As the relevant law that would apply to a claim of self-defence depends upon the jurisdiction, we limited our analysis to the Australian Commonwealth Criminal Code and the Rome Statute. We would be very interested to hear about how our analysis might apply in other jurisdictions. We have split the issues up into four discrete posts. In this post, we discuss the circumstances where self-defence does and does not apply during an armed conflict. This also entails discussing the combatant’s privilege. In our next post, we will deal with whether it is lawful under the criminal law concept of self-defence to cause incidental injury (aka, collateral damage) and whether the law relating to self-defence imposes requirements similar to the ‘precautions in attack’ under article 57 Additional Protocol I. The third post will be a comparison of how LOAC and the law of self-defence deal with a number of discrete issues like the use of prohibited weapons, obedience to lawful commands, and ‘duty’ to retreat. And in the final post we will briefly address the rules of engagement (ROE) concept of unit self-defence. You say tomato, I say tomahto Self-defence is not a unitary concept, but rather has different legal and operational meanings. It is vital to distinguish between the different meanings and ask in what context is the term ‘self-defence’ being used. Our chapter is about an individual claiming self-defence when facing potential criminal (or disciplinary) charges. It is not about a State’s right of self-defence under article 51 UN Charter (or customary international law).. Whether or not a State has a right to use force in national self-defence is a separate and distinct issue from whether an individual is not guilty of crime under the relevant self-defence provisions pertaining in a particular criminal jurisdiction.
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07 Jul

The naturalization ceremony is now a part of the July 4th ritual, right up there with picnics, parades, and fireworks. The script is faithfully recounted in newspapers across the country. Dignified surroundings (courtrooms, historic sites, ballparks) with presiding local luminaries (judges, office holders, public intellectuals), celebratory family members in tow. US flag-waving applicants from [fill-in-the-blank] number of countries. Short summaries...

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