In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Search: battlefield robots

10 Nov

...January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning. That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil. It’s still funded as an open-ended battlefield necessity, although the last prisoner arrived in March 2008. But it functions more like a gated community in an American suburb than a forward-operating base in one of Afghanistan’s...
10.11.11 | |

17 May

...1979 for the top-secret test of a new missile system. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli army took South African Defense Force chief Constand Viljoen and his colleagues to the front lines, and Viljoen routinely flew visiting Israeli military advisors and embassy attachés to the battlefield in Angola where his troops were battling Angolan and Cuban forces. There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on...
17.05.10 | |

19 Oct

[Dr. Thomas D. Grant is a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Fellow of the National Security Institute at George Mason University.] Remedy for the Breach: Seating Ukraine Part One of this blogpost proposed that the anomaly of Russia’s presence as a Security Council Permanent Member be addressed through Rule 17 of the Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Security Council. To recall, Rule 17 provides that “[a]ny representative on the Security Council, to whose credentials objection...
19.10.22 | |

28 May

...Afghanistan has put in place an exceptionally restrictive ROE for the purpose of minimizing civilian harm that goes beyond what the law itself would require – but that is a matter of discretionary counterinsurgency strategy, not a requirement of law. Review of strikes is by the military itself, in theatre. The CIA, up until recently at least, has had a different strategic role and mission – taking out high value targets far from battlefield action, on the basis of various intelligence sources. The use of force is far more focused,...
28.05.10 | |

25 Jun

...Hague conventions. Putting aside the fact that most of them had never read any of those treaties, the key fact that they all missed was that America’s Islamist enemies were not a party to these agreements. What’s more, the conventions strictly forbade combatants from hiding and attacking from within civilian populations. Lawful combatants were also required to appear on the battlefield wearing something, whether a uniform or even just an armband, identifying them as combatants — overgrown bears and high-water pants didn’t count. The long and short of it was...
25.06.12 | |

21 Jan

...equipped to answer some international law questions than others. Rationalist accounts may be better equipped to make general predictions about “states” than to explain specific individual decisions. Anthropology, on the other hand, may be able to explain those individual decisions, but with its emphasis on deep description, may not yield many generalizable hypotheses. Controlled experiments will be easier to carry out in some contexts than others: it is easier, for example, to test the opinions of the general public than that of experts in negotiation or on the battlefield. Public...
21.01.15 | |

06 May

...but joining ISIS (or al-Nusra) as reprehensible. This lack of regularity undermines existing policies, as it gives the impression that the distinction is based on ideology, which is a dangerous precedent to set. This development is especially alarming given that the Western-backed coalition (including Russia’s) objectives may not align with those of the YPG’s in the long-run. Kurdish territorial ambitions in a fragmented Iraq and Syria are likely to increase – not diminish – with battlefield success, pitting them against the US, Turkey, Russia, and Iran once the guns fall...
06.05.16 | |

18 May

The NY Times ran this piece this morning on the challenge of coming up with estimates of the total dead as a result of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. The problem is common in the face of mass humanitarian disasters: how to estimate death tolls in a place with no birth or death certificates or accurate census data, where complete villages have been destroyed, and where the size and conditions on the battlefield are such that actual counting of bodies is next to impossible. Moreover, survivors are...
18.05.05 | |

12 Jun

...the “specific direction” standard bulldozes over. In broaching the question of necessity, courts would discriminate between: (a) providing Syrian rebel groups with weapons (knowing that they will lead to some international crimes) in order to prevent bloodletting of civilians on a massive scale; and (b) furnishing the same weapons (knowing that they will lead to some international crimes) in order to trial cutting edge military technologies in a battlefield setting. Clearly, the rationale for the assistance matters enormously in ascribing moral and criminal responsibility, but the new “specific direction” standard...
12.06.13 | |

05 Mar

...treatment. And they secure the right to appeal to Article III judges – all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In addition, like our federal civilian courts, reformed commissions allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence gathering, and for the safety and security of participants. A key difference is that, in military commissions, evidentiary rules reflect the realities of the battlefield and of conducting investigations in a war zone. For example, statements may be admissible even in the absence of Miranda warnings, because we...
05.03.12 | |

13 Jun

...in relatively short order). See, e.g., Slip. Op. at 51, 52-53. This is at the heart of the mess that Roberts and Kennedy stumble into as they talk past one another in their discussion of direct vs. collateral review. Where the pre-habeas process is battlefield interrogation by U.S. soldiers, as the Solicitor General came close to suggesting in Hamdi, habeas courts will be searching and skeptical. Where the pre-habeas process offers a legitimate chance for innocent detainees to prove that innocence to an independent decisionmaker, the procedures and standards applied...
13.06.08 | |

23 Oct

...princess would. But what do I know? I once thought that a really great TV comedy in the 1990s would be an American military surgeon assigned (in order to get much needed expertise, this being the pre Iraq 1990s) to a roving team of those plucky, happy go lucky, hard partying Swiss doctors out dealing with landmine and other battlefield injuries across the world: sounded pretty funny to me but, if one needed confirmation that it was not, it sounded pretty funny to my friends at the ICRC, too. Jody,...
23.10.08 | |