Search: battlefield robots
15 Dec Why Ukraine and the International Community Should Demand that Russia Renounce Territorial Expansion
...as it would have been too much for Iran to admit past violations when agreeing to the JCPOA. The main point of the peace agreement is not a comprehensive justice mechanism of the sort that would be viable if Russia had been utterly vanquished on the battlefield. We do not need another Treaty of Versailles. But taken in total, the proposed text undermines peremptory norms to an inexcusable extent. Providing the “Empire is Over” Clause would underline that we are not entering a new era where the logic of empire...24 Nov Reponse by Professor Matthew Waxman, “International Standards for Detaining Terrorism Suspects: Moving Beyond the Armed Conflict-Criminal Divide.”
...advocates; full discovery versus secrecy provisions. While it is tempting to think of administrative detention as lying between the criminal and law-of-war models, depending on how these matters are resolved, an administrative system can be even less liberty-protective than traditional battlefield hearings or more liberty-protective than criminal prosecution (a point Monica makes on p. 409). And these are just variations of procedural or institutional design. I’d like to hear more discussion about substantive questions of administrative detention law. Monica is quite right when she says: The availability of meaningful legal...07 Aug Catching up on Hamdan
...charges brought against him demonstrates that the jury weighed the evidence carefully. Unlike Senator Obama who voted against the MCA and favors giving Al Qaeda terrorists direct access to U.S. civilian courts to contest their detention, I recognize that we cannot treat dangerous terrorists captured on the battlefield as we would common criminals. Of course, that’s not quite Obama’s position. That campaign issued this statement: I commend the military officers who presided over this trial and served on the hearing panel under difficult and unprecedented circumstances. They and all our...01 Feb A Response to Sean Watts by Geoffrey Corn
...of the law in other areas. To his credit, Prof. Watts points out that it is the attenuation from the traditional battlefield that in large measure justifies deviation from the traditional combatant civilian dichotomy and that his proposal should not be viewed as a general condemnation of that tradition. Nonetheless, I believe his proposal will beg the question: if state association should be the singular focus for determining who can engage in CNA operations when the operative is unlikely to be observed by the enemy and therefore will not implicate...12 Feb The Shift from Proportionality to Necessity and an Indirect Comment on Gaby Blum’s Article
...So that is part of the discussion necessarily, even if only to establish status. And this is a discussion driven by legal considerations – if one is engaged in targeting people who are not on the conventional or overt battlefield, or wearing uniforms, or in a camp, or what have you, then it is necessarily far more “intelligence” driven as a form of using force. The intelligence has a strategic use, of course, but it also has a legal function – necessity and, in the special sense I have used...01 Feb A Response to Geoffrey Corn
...have, for so long, actually reflected both States’ will and accounted for battlefield realities. My sense is that, in CNA, the criteria cannot operate long without provoking harmful distrust of the law’s efficacy. The Article set out to highlight what I perceived to be a threatening dissonance between that law and the realities of a rapidly changing and increasingly relevant realm of combat. It seems our discussion reveals potential normative and theoretical points about the evolution of the law of war as well. Professor Corn and I are perhaps like-minded...12 Oct Has Amnesty International Jumped the Shark?
...because there is zero chance that Bush will be detained anywhere (much less in Canada). In fact, the likely rejection of AI’s view on this by more and more states will undermine AI’s goals in the long run. In any event, I somehow doubt that in the spring of 2013, Amnesty will await (hopefully) then-former President Obama with a similar memorandum (following the legal opinions of folks like Mary Ellen O’Connell that Obama has committed violations of the laws of war) over his authorization of drone attacks outside the battlefield....
17 May Who are the Occupants? — A Reply to Dr. Nguyen’s Post
...Republic of China government declared sovereignty over the Islands in 1947; only France voiced objections. The Silent International Community after the Armed Conflicts in 1974 The law of occupation is a matter of jus in bello, but the sovereignty of the battlefield is not. As is also noted by Dr. Nguyen, the claim of reparation relies on a prior wrongful act of occupying foreign territories. The international community generally does not acquiesce to unlawful attacks of foreign territories. For example, the disputed Six-Day War in 1967 received a unanimous Security...