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Search: battlefield robots

10 Jan

...the foreign forces were still present in Afghanistan and party to the ongoing armed conflict at the time. What might be made of the remedial obligation – that is, if IHL duties of protection are not met, what follows – that the applicants raised? In short, we typically think of the protection of civilians as actions taken on the battlefield, but in such special circumstances where there is an acknowledged special connection between the civilians in question and the state, could bureaucratic actions taken at home such as the proper...
10.01.22 | |

12 Jan

...of guidance as to the interpretation of the authorization of the use of military force in the Hamdi case, where the court interpreted that enactment and determined that the detention of an individual who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan fell within the scope of that. And they relied there, I think, on customary practices in the conduct of warfare in determining what fell within the scope of the authorization. FEINSTEIN: Let me stop you right here, because that’s right. Because detention is a necessary following of an authorization...
12.01.06 | |

05 Feb

...the Tadic test: the organization requirement. The White Paper simply assumes that “al-Qa’ida and its associated forces” constitute a single organized armed group for purposes of IHL — “a transnational, non-state actor” that is “one of the parties” involved in “the non-international armed conflict between the United States and al-Qa’ida that the Supreme Court recognized in Hamdan” (emphasis mine). Indeed, the White Paper must make that assumption because, by its own admission, what justifies targeting a “senior operational leader” away from an active battlefield is precisely that, as a member...
05.02.13 | |

02 Mar

Last year the British media entered into a voluntary agreement with the British Ministry of Defence to have a news blackout of Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan. Harry had been serving there about ten weeks when the news broke on the Drudge Report of his whereabouts. The BBC is now defending the news blackout. From the sounds of it, in exchange for extensive filming of Harry on the battlefield, the British press would keep mum about his deployment to Afghanistan. “So, for the past ten weeks, the BBC, ITV and...
02.03.08 | |

15 Dec

...without formal precedential value, it is predictable that other federal judges would reach the same result. The idea that military commission rules offer any legitimate advantage over federal courts is simply wrong. While Ghailani’s judge did exclude one witness the government desired to use on the basis that he had been identified through coercive interrogation, military commission rules should have produced the same result. In general, military commission rules for handling classified information are now very closely based on those used in federal courts, while issues such as battlefield intelligence...
15.12.10 | |

18 Dec

[Dr Chiara Redaelli is a research fellow at the University of Geneva, IHL and ICL expert with the International Development Law Organization Ukraine Office and co-editor in chief of the on the Use of Force and International Law] From Drug Boats to Battlefields? The United States’ Case for Using Force against Cartels Since early September 2025, the United States has carried out a series of lethal strikes against suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, publicly framed as a campaign against so-called “narco-terrorists.” The operations, announced by the Trump...
18.12.25 | |

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 | |

06 Jul

...this guy? Presumably it was acting under the statutory AUMF we’ve been discussing so much of late (e.g. here), on the theory that the statute authorizing the President to use force against those persons and organizations he deems responsible for the attacks of 9/11. That such persons or organizations may be captured outside the confines of the Afghan/Pakistan battlefield has long been a (more or less explicit) part of both Bush and Obama administrations’ readings of that statute, a reading informed (in this administration) by the understanding that the international...
06.07.11 | |

01 Apr

...are attacked (including with lethal force) should not amount to gratuitous injury or suffering. I contend that the right to use armed force is limited to the objective of rendering individuals hors de combat (taken out of battle) or, in the collective sense, to defeating enemy forces. Parties have a right to kill enemy combatants during hostilities, but that right is constrained when killing is manifestly unnecessary to removing an individual from the battlefield. In some circumstances, it will thus be unlawful to use lethal force when a fighter could...
01.04.13 | |

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 | |