Search: crossing lines
26 Apr Israel, Gaza, and the End of “Effective Control”
...– a cargo terminal closed for security after Hamas’s 2007 takeover, Erez (north) – the only pedestrian crossing, and Rafah (south) – the sole major crossing point into Egypt, currently controlled by Egypt and Hamas. After disengagement, Israel and the PA signed the Agreement on Movement and Access (“AMA”) – giving the Palestinians and Egypt control over Rafah and allowing increased traffic through the Erez and Karni crossings – and the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing (“APRC”), which elaborates on the AMA. The APRC required a third party to monitor...
01 Nov Conversation on WAR
...peace-keeping commander saying there was too much confusion about what it meant to move from peace-keeping to war fighting. He calls it ‘crossing the Mogadishu line’ and claimed that crossing that line was to the detriment of the peacekeepers and the people of Somalia. So talking about war or war fighting can be a signifier: moving from engaging in the use of force for a certain limited end i.e. to deliver food in Somalia or protect civilians, to something where your limited mission is seemingly put aside and you put...12 May Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 1)
...IHL. International Humanitarian Law The letter frames its claims on the following argument: “International humanitarian law is unequivocal that where a civilian population is in need of life-saving aid, impartial humanitarian action ‘shall be undertaken’. In order to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, international law requires impartial humanitarian actors to seek the consent of the parties concerned. In February 2014, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2139 demanding that all parties, in particular the Syrian authorities, allow rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access across conflict lines...23 Sep Book Symposium: Cyber War – A Duty to Hack and the Boundaries of Analogical Reasoning
...(including the potential for it to incentivize greater military cyber surveillance to solidify the reliability of various cyber capabilities). In doing this analysis, however, I was struck by the larger challenges of using analogies to carve out the existing lines of IHL in cyberspace (not to mention the contours of any new lines that I propose). As a result, I ended up framing my chapter around a larger, introductory analysis of the role of boundaries in legal discourse over cyberspace. Readers may be familiar with debates over whether cyberspace is...10 Oct How to Get Quirin Right When Quirin Was Wrong
...on are all military offenses that have no analogous "crime" in either domestic or international law. There is no actual charge of spying. The offense in Quirin was "passing through lines of defense without uniform". This has nothing to do with spying, or the civilian crime of espionage. It also has a special rule, because if the enemy solider passes back through your lines and rejoins his army then the offense is cancelled out and he can never be charged with it. There is no comparable "home free" rule that...25 Feb Drones as Strategic Airpower and the Light Cavalry?
...with sophisticated surveillance gear but also missiles, act as the lightest of light cavalry. They probe, surveil, and engage in pinprick attacks, behind enemy lines, far beyond one’s own lines. When the CIA engages in targeted killing against some Al Qaeda operative in Somalia, from a strategic perspective, it is a combat raiding strategy by very light cavalry indeed. But it is so far beyond one’s own lines, as it were, that from a legal standpoint, I would place it beyond the legal “armed conflict” altogether and treat this combat...
30 Oct Third Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Three Tales of Omelas – Utopia, Harm and International Law
...Mathias Thaler in his recent book, No Other Planet (2022), calls these flaws “fault-lines”. For Thaler, these fault-lines are an essential part of the utopian method. They force the reader to reflect, and probe the utopian project they are being presented with. Such faults and cracks are a common feature of critical utopias as they prompt interrogation of what is meant by utopia, highlight the contingency of the present in the fictional narrative, and open up future potentialities. Utopianism, then, is not just about some utopian destination or place, it...01 Aug When Does the Combatant’s Privilege Apply?
...and (3)). Please see the Yale J. Int'l L. article and our Int'l Crim. Law casebook, chpt. on the laws of war, re: Quirin. Howard Gilbert The Qurin offense is passing through lines without uniform. That is, the Qurin defendents took off their uniforms and in civilian clothes pretending to be civilians they passed through US lines of defense and moved around in our unprotected rear areas. This is an offense against the laws of war that renders them unlawful belligerents and strips them of their combatant immunity. Such people...
02 May Soldier Self-Defense Symposium: The View from the Ground – Emerging State Practice on Individual and Unit Self-Defense
...that questions about self-defense are even being raised at this point is because practice has far outpaced the law. Thus, to complement the other contributors’ outlines of state positions, I am going to focus on the state of practice surrounding self-defense. For this I will rely on a series of studies I conducted examining how individual and unit self-defense have been used by different NATO countries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other undeclared conflict zones. In addition to background legal research, I interviewed some 78 military lawyers, commanders, and other...