Search: self-defense
29 Jul Emerging Voices: Distinction without a Difference – The UN’s Attempt to Fight A War Without Fighting A War
...where one party commits blatant violations, “continued equal treatment of all parties by the United Nations can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil.” (Brahimi Report) Peacekeepers also cannot use force except in self-defense or in defense of mandate. “Defense of mandate” may accommodate offensive use of force in some circumstances (e.g., to protect civilians under imminent threat), but peacekeepers certainly cannot lawfully conduct offensive seek-and-disarm missions. Because peacekeepers are not “used outside the humanitarian function to conduct hostilities,” they...12 Apr Guest Post: How International Law Could Work in Transnational Non-International Armed Conflicts: Part II of a Two-Part Series
...of NIAC and a new interpretations of self-defense permitted the attack. If these two legal regimes (the law of self-defense and NIAC) are left rudderless, is human rights law strong enough to trump them both and correct this problem? And if not, is there reason to seriously consider 1) ensuring that an expanded concept of imminence does not gain international acceptability, 2) States coming together to explicitly prohibit the application of NIAC outside the territory of the State where the NIAC is occurring, and 3) ensuring that States conducting targeting...28 Jun Is it Time to Facilitate Cyberwar?
...that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say. “We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official, who asked not to be identified because authorization had not been given to speak on the record. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a...12 Mar Bradley Book Symposium: The Reality of International Delegations
...this approach. In that decision, the Supreme Court interpreted a key provision of the U.N. Charter obligating the U.S. to comply with International Court of Justice as non-self executing, thus relieving U.S. courts from any obligation to implement an ICJ’s judgment. In my view, the relevant language could have been interpreted as either self-executing or non-self-executing, but the structural tensions created by a self-executing interpretation tipped the balance. The decision of whether and how to comply with an ICJ judgment was rightly left to either the State of Texas or...10 Sep Rawlsian Justifications for Humanitarian Intervention
...is meant as an argument of opting into “fair” distributions, by means of ones own self-interest (The veil of ignorance aims to extend this self interest to an a-historical situation). Although in later work, Rawls does seem to make concessions to more Kantian and communitarian claims, self-interest remains a primary engine of the original position-construct. There also lies the key issue with which I’m struggling: universal appeal of anything, and thus also ius cogens, seems very far away from the Rawlsian distribution theory. It is rather assumed that there are...11 Jun An Open Letter to the Israeli Government Condemning Annexation [Final Update]
entitled to determine their political fate in accordance with the right to self-determination. Furthermore, this prohibition applies to all territories occupied by force, even if it is claimed that force was initially used in an act of self-defense. The West Bank was taken by force in 1967. It has been consistently recognized by the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, and the International Court of Justice as an occupied territory, in which the Palestinian people is entitled to fulfill its right to self-determination. This remains so even if bilateral...
18 Oct Where De Facto States Come to Rest: The Approaching Demise of the So-called Republic of Artsakh
...are divested of the right to renew military operations even if the agreement does not introduce peace in the full extension of the term, as questions of title to territorial sovereignty may remain outstanding. When the parties to a conflict reach a ceasefire agreement, the absence of an impending harm frustrates the ratione temporis requirement of immediacy in self-defense as a feature of the broader requirement of necessity in lawful uses of force, pursuant to Article 51of the UN Charter. In other words, a ceasefire agreement creates a new objective...25 Mar Medellin v. Texas: Another Set of Early Thoughts
...not self-executing, although it might be a stretch to say it holds as much. The Chief’s majority opinion does strongly reject the dissenters’ opposite presumption, and that is important in itself. But keep in mind that the Chief carefully distinguishes between the different ways that treaties may or may not be self-executing. The Vienna Convention is plainly self-executing in that it binds the Houston police to give warnings without further implementing legislation, and it may be self-executing in the sense that individuals can assert violations on their own in court...26 Jan Self-Interest and Compliance
decisions that comply with international obligations is based not so much on the effective threat of sanction but on the internalization of those norms into the judiciary itself (of course, internalization of such norms by the executive would also assist compliance). So, why is it that we see compliance by states that we know tend to act out of self-interest? Maybe because sometimes they view it in their self-interest to comply and sometimes because their decision-makers have been acculturated to believe it is the normatively “right” thing to do. And,...28 Sep A Treaty-Happy Senate?
...argument that the declarations actually constitute inadmissible reservations or are otherwise unacceptable). Second, from a U.S. law stand-point there’s the question of the Senate’s ability to make a declaration of self-execution, which I don’t think it has ever done before, at least not in the resolution of advice and consent itself (past SFRC reports have, of course, expressed opinions on whether the SFRC understood the treaty to be self-executing in one or more senses of that term, or otherwise dependent on ex-ante or ex-post legislation in some way). At a...