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Search: drones

01 May

...He made the best case anyone could, but it left a lot to be desired. Throughout his tenure at State, we called on the administration to ensure that its targeted killing program was consistent with the laws of war. We’re still not satisfied that it is. But on a range of issues — military commissions, treaties, Guantanamo Bay, detention, and transparency on drones — Koh forged progress behind the scenes. This wasn’t the kind of work that made headlines, but it strengthened respect for human rights and reduced suffering. If...
01.05.15 | |

21 Jun

...Al Qaeda at the time of the Cole bombing — before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the authorization by Congress to use military force against their perpetrators. The United States initially handled the Cole attack as a peacetime terrorism crime, but the government now contends that a state of armed conflict had legally existed since 1996, when Osama bin Laden declared war against the United States. According to the Obama administration, therefore, “firing missiles from drones that kill people over an extended period of time pursuant to a U.N.-authorized...
21.06.11 | |

25 Apr

...industrial zone. Lawfare highlights a snippet of testimony given at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on drones that alleges that the Obama Administration is targeting and killing low-level insurgents, the detainment of whom caused much criticism during the Bush Administration years. In addition to British, French and Israeli allegations, Qatar is now saying that Syria has been using chemical weapons against its own people. Under pressure from the political far-right, Switzerland has now restricted immigration from all EU countries, placing an annual restriction on the number of resident permits it...
25.04.13 | |

20 Mar

...they do not, what kinds of compensation may ever be made available to those who wrongfully suffer a misdirected attack – who knows? By a number of accounts – Richard Clarke’s and others – CIA came to be in the drone business substantially because the military, and especially the Air Force, didn’t want the mission in the 1990’s when the idea of putting a missile on surveillance drones in the interest of counterterrorism first came into vogue. Times have since changed. CIA is no longer the only option. There is...
20.03.13 | |

10 Feb

...Azerbaijanis. For this reason, it falls in violation of the 2008 General Assembly resolution which reaffirms that “no State should recognize as lawful the situation resulting from the occupation of Azerbaijan’s territories, or render assistance in maintaining that situation”. In the continued spirit of Islamophobia, the French Senate resolution also refers to “jihadist mercenaries” aiding the Azerbaijani army, despite the controversy surrounding these claims, and in spite of consensus amongst military experts that Azerbaijan’s military successes resulted from its use of advanced drones that were able to target Armenian military...
10.02.21 | |

12 Dec

...as follows: “[As civil libertarians wearing ‘rose colored glasses’ would have it,] [t]he AUMF triggered the president’s commander-in-chief power, which enables him to detain enemy combatants indefinitely and kill them with drones and other weapons….” As an initial matter, hard to figure out what Eric means, “the AUMF triggered” the President’s Commander-in-Chief power. The President is CINC in wartime and not, and whatever powers Article II of the Constitution provides him (more on which anon) I figure they’d exist whether Congress “triggers” them or not. More to the point, it...
12.12.12 | |

10 Oct

...history of major contradictions, paradoxes, potentials, and limits, is far less teleological, or unitary, than what many have said so far. Sometimes they, the work of the laws of war and that of peacemaking, overlap and work cooperatively, whereas at other times they operate completely independently, or even work in ways going directly against each other, with occasionally potentially dangerous implications in light of relatively new technological (e.g. drones, autonomous weapons), legal (such as the 9/11 AUMF, the responsibility to protect), and certain ideological developments (the rise of emergency doctrines)....
10.10.16 | |

20 Feb

An Israeli soldier has caused outrage because of a photo posted to Instagram showing what appears to be a Palestinian child in the crosshairs of his rifle. Chinese government officials considered using a drone to target a suspected drug lord hiding in Myanmar. In other drone news, the United Arab Emirates has signed a contract with the US to purchase approximately $200 million worth of American-made drones. Reuters provides coverage of the pre-trial hearing of Laurent Gbagbo at the ICC, a proceeding which began yesterday. 20 rebels are dead and...
20.02.13 | |

16 Jan

Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that the United States would give Afghanistan its own fleet of aerial surveillance drones and would speed up the handover of detainees held by American forces. The European Court of Human Rights has found in Eweida and Others v. The United Kingdom (ECHR court document) that British Airways discriminated against a devoutly Christian employee by making her remove her crucifix while at work. Libyan government documents show that Libya authorized payment of almost $200 million to Mauritania months after it extradited Libyan ex-spy chief Senussi...
16.01.13 | |

06 Apr

...violations by the other. Instead, as Human Rights Watch has shown through detailed, on-the-ground investigations, Israeli forces fired white phosphorous munitions indiscriminately over civilian areas, shot and killed Palestinian civilians waving white flags, attacked children playing on rooftops with precision missiles fired from aerial drones and needlessly destroyed civilian property. Now let’s move on to various HRW reports. HRW, April 23, 2009:” Human Rights Watch’s investigation into the fighting in Gaza concluded that Israeli forces were responsible for serious violations of the laws of war, including the use of heavy...
06.04.11 | |

25 Apr

[Nancy Simons is a Belgian lawyer and serves on the International Bar Association’s Drones Task Force. Her professional background lies in international law generally. She has worked at a number of international non-governmental organisations and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.] It has been almost two weeks since the United States (US) initiated several missile strikes on a Syrian airfield. From the US perspective, the justification for this use of force was that it was in response to the use of chemical weapons allegedly by the Assad regime....
25.04.17 | |

19 Oct

Earlier this week, Harold Koh gave a speech. And it wasn’t about conflicts, drones, or cyberwar, topics that have dominated the attention of international lawyers in recent years. Rather, Koh’s speech was a meditation on the processes of international law-making that confront the State Department on a daily basis. It was, simply put, a survey of the current international legal landscape from the U.S. perspective. Koh reviewed the formal U.S. treaty-making process, citing past victories like the New START Treaty and the Obama Administration’s continued push for Senate advice and...
19.10.12 | |