Search: battlefield robots

18 Nov LJIL Symposium: A Comment on Janina Dill’s “Should International Law Ensure the Moral Acceptability of War?”

...distinguished just combatants from unjust combatants or else ignored the combatant/civilian distinction altogether and just focused on individual contribution to the war. Yet, (un)justness of cause is mired in uncertainty (what Dill terms “an epistemically-cloaked forced choice”) and the complexity of the battlefield makes it impossible to determine individual contribution to the war. Consequently, any attempt to design a more nuanced doctrine of targeting will end up being impossible to administer and too vague to offer real guidance for belligerents, thereby violating the rule of law – a moral principle...

01 May Was the Kunduz Hospital Attack a War Crime?

...stress) and, negligence in the battlefield itself , under stress and fire, where, the judgment of commander actions , shall and must be, much less severe, due to probable necessities and improvisations on the ground . And so , If : negligence, is revealed prior to battlefield stress, and : could be avoided by carefully or reasonably sticking to written protocols, and : huge loss could be anticipated in advance due to it , then: The prosecutor in Hague , could find great interest in it .For less than that...

24 Jan Jean-Marie Henckaerts Responds to Ken Anderson on ICRC Customary International Humanitarian Law Study

...the last twenty years – would still be considered lawful by States in case they constitute military objectives and sufficient precautions are taken. If mere battlefield behaviour were examined such targets would have to be considered off-limit. The same is true for nuclear weapons: on the basis of a mere consideration of battlefield practice, nuclear weapons would have to be considered unlawful – a position clearly not shared by the nuclear powers. This shows that verbal acts have an important impact on how battlefield practice has to be looked at....

22 Apr Opposition to Drone Use in Libya

...the population. There are two things working against this acceptance of drones as a positive addition to the battlefield. One is quite simply the Terminator-like creepiness of machines making war against men that many people have commented upon in discussing drones. The other is the perception that drones, because they are remotely controlled, are less accurate than manned aircraft. The opponents of drone use in Pakistan and Yemen, whose legal complaint was mainly about whether the legal threshold of armed conflict had been crossed or whether the boundaries of the...

16 Jan Armed Conflict With Al Qaida: A Response

...on the battlefield, even where the detainees themselves were captured elsewhere. Our federal courts require a chain of custody to be presented for all evidence introduced at trial, and this could pose a great deal of difficulty for our forces. Ultimately, we think we are not legally obligated to try al Qaida combatants under the laws of war, but have set up military commissions to prosecute those who have committed the most serious violations of the laws of war. Eric Posner invites me to say what is as stake in...

23 Oct REVISED — Military Commissions, Round 3

...reading rights might make sense is years and miles removed from any actual battlefield, or if the simple reading of rights is all that stands in the way of welcoming a detainee to a lifetime of lawful imprisonment (after successful conviction in federal criminal court) rather than sending him off to Saudi Arabia for “rehabilitation.” To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that I think soldiers, for example, are somehow required to read combatant detainees Miranda warnings. Just the opposite: current law on Miranda warnings recognizes an exigency...