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...
03 Oct The Agreement Between the UK and France on the Prevention of Dangerous Journeys
...illegal crossing before – subject to full documentation and security and eligibility checks.’ As the Agreement entered into force, Channel crossings in small boats by persons seeking to claim international protection in the United Kingdom were continuing at a high level- official figures released on 11 August 2025 confirmed that more than 50,000 people had made the journey since July 2024, up from some 36,000 in the preceding twelve months. It continues to be dangerous and in some cases lethal-at least 20 people are recorded as having died in connection...
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...
02 Mar (Ir-)Responsible by Design? Corporate Guardrails and the Governance of Military AI
...to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control” leaves room for flexible and open interpretations of these “red lines”. . While Anthropic were clearer and firmer in their stance, OpenAI seem to be taking a more strategic stance; publicly posturing themselves as upholding safety, legal and ethical “red lines” while ensuring there is opportunity to exploit the military “gray zones” the DoD claim they cannot avoid. The fact that OpenAI suggests it was able to secure the guardrails that Anthropic was...
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...
03 Apr Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: Navigating the Governance of Dual-Use Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Times of Geopolitical Rivalries
...extensive lines of code involved, rendering it challenging for enforcement agencies to assess. Unlike conventional technologies where physical characteristics can be examined, AI systems often consist of intricate algorithms with millions of lines of code, making it daunting to verify their functionalities, especially when those functionalities could have both benign and harmful applications. In addition to the monitoring and verification challenges, AI is increasingly provided as a service rather than a standalone product, complicating export controls and oversight of its use across multiple countries. With the rise of cloud computing...
03 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Reflections on the “Scorecard,” Transnational Legal Process and the Paris Agreement
...give one example, the normative idea of transnational legal process would suggest that the travel ban should have been litigated as an international human rights issue. In practice, however, the litigation had to be rooted in the Establishment Clause and administrative law arguments to prevail in the lower courts (and even these arguments, dismayingly, did not win a majority of the Supreme Court). Professor Koh gives a good description of this litigation, but he does not address the tension between his transnational legal process frame and the lines on which...