Search: self-defense
08 Oct Rethinking International Law After Gaza Symposium: Massacring Civilians – Genocide as International Legal Conundrum
...other international legal doctrines: state self-defense and prohibition of terrorism. Neocolonial states consistently allege to be acting in self-defense or in the interest of global security when they massacre civilians in the global South. (The U.S. “war on terror” exemplifies this tactic.) These neocolonial states also allege that mass civilian deaths are “mistakes” or “collateral damage.” The state’s claim of self-defense is so sacred in the contemporary international legal system that the burden of proof falls on victims of massacres to prove civilian targeting. Neocolonial states consistently murder disproportionately more...22 Oct The Military Intervention in Rio de Janeiro and Human Rights
...sufficiently intense protracted armed violence and organized armed groups, however, the applicable rules for the Rio operation is international human rights law. These standards, reflected in the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials and the case-law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, require lethal force to be a measure of last resort, only to be used in cases involving self-defense or the defense of others against a threat of death or serious injury – a standard known as “absolute necessity”....
24 Apr An Option for ECOWAS?: The Legality of Treaty-Based Regional Organization Military Intervention Under the Jus Ad Bellum (Part I)
“an instrument of national policy.” As the International Military Tribunal for Germany (IMT) explained in its Nuremberg Judgment, the Pact made it illegal for any state to engage in armed conflict with another state except for purposes of self-defense. Under the U.N. Charter, that customary prohibition is codified in Article 2(4), which is subject to two treaty-based exceptions. Article 51 reiterates the core customary exception of self-defense. Article 42, however, further provides that states may lawfully utilize force against another state pursuant to UNSC authorization. This did not codify any...06 Apr The Strike in Syria – Is the International Law Calculation Different Now Than in 2013?
but I think unpersuasive. The United States today has its own troops on the ground in Syria – troops that were not present in 2013, troops stationed (at least some of them) as close as 50 miles away from the site of the chemical weapons attack. In the abstract, one might imagine this could lead the United States to offer some sort of self-defense justification (in defense of our own nationals). But given our troops are in Syria (to fight ISIS) without Syrian consent, and given Syria’s apparent determination since...24 Mar Drone Warfare and UAVs in House Subcommittee Hearing
...my view, the proper legal frame is international law of self-defense – and it is what the US has traditionally viewed the exercise of these discrete uses of force by the CIA, covert or clandestine, as being anyway. These two legal rationales eventually lead to different legal conclusions, constraints and authority for the use of force. My view is that forcing CIA targeted killing in places that might range widely in the world into armed conflict rationales is bad for the CIA’s legal reasoning, and requires ever greater legal contortions...
24 Sep France’s Declaration on International Law in Cyberspace: The Law of Peacetime Cyber Operations, Part I
expressed and expanded upon this view in several key strategic documents such as the 2013 “White Book on Defense and National Security” (Livre blanc sur la défense et la sécurité nationale), the 2017 “International Cyber Strategy” (Stratégie internationale de la France pour le numérique) and the 2018 “Strategic Review of Cyberdefense” (Revue stratégique de cyberdéfense) as well as two major speeches by Jean-Yves Le Drian, the then minister of defense (and later of foreign affairs), of 12 December 2016 in Bruz and 15 December 2017 in Aix-en-Provence. The new document...
20 Jul U.S. and Allied Involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War: The Belligerent Status of NATO States and Its Implications
...Such assistance would dramatically expand the military-industrial resources available to Russia and thus substantially improve its prospects for defeating Ukraine. Effective self-defense against indirect aggression may therefore require targeting the aggressor coalition’s military-industrial center of gravity by employing armed force against the indirect aggressor. For example, in 1972 the United States interdicted Soviet-North Vietnamese sea lines of communication by mining North Vietnamese harbors against Soviet shipping. Critically, such actions are far more likely to be viewed as lawful elements of a “war of self-defense” if it is recognized that a...14 Jul Amos Guiora on the Law of Targetted Killings
Related to Ken’s earlier post, Amos Guiora has a piece up at Foreign Policy describing the legal analysis he applied when advising the Israeli Defense Forces on targeted killings of terrorists. He argues that international law permits targeted killing when certain conditions are met: The decision to use targeted killing of terrorists is based on an expansive articulation of the concept of pre-emptive self defense, intelligence information, and an analysis regarding policy effectiveness. According to Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, a nation state can respond to an armed attack....26 Apr So Was Congress Thinking of Authorizing Force in Syria?
...other small set of problems around Syrian intervention: international law. The UN Charter says that one state can use force against another in two circumstances: (1) if the UN Security Council authorizes it, or (2) in national or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs, until the Security Council has time to act. In Libya, we had a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing military intervention. There is no such resolution here, and at the moment, slim prospect of obtaining one given Russia’s opposition to intervention. Is this plausibly self-defense, for...