Search: self-defense
24 Nov Meanwhile, China Draws a Provocative, Dangerous, But Perfectly Legal Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea
I don’t have any insights to offer on the big news this weekend, that legally-non binding-UNSC-resolution-violating agreement in Geneva. But I did want to note one other big sort-of-law news item from the other side of the world: China’s announcement that it is drawing an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, including over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. China’s announcement has riled up both Japan (which has declared it “totally unacceptable”) and the United States (which has expressed “deep concerns.”) Why all the fuss? China’s new ADIZ...02 Mar YJIL Online Symposium: Response to Gabriella Blum
— should perhaps factor into a lesser-humanitarian-evil principle or criminal defense.) Might an unintended consequence of Professor Blum’s proposal, designed to provide military operators and planners with more humanitarian-protective flexibility, be to further shift the locus of debates about the interpretation of IHL and resolution of its most difficult dilemmas from State practice to international criminal tribunals? There are probably some very good reasons for using a criminal law defense as a mechanism for adapting IHL in the way Professor Blum proposes, including that it helps ensure that a new...19 Oct Cassel on the War Against Defense Attorneys
...Stafford also stated in the email that “The interrogator said I told my clients to kill themselves, and word was passed to the three men who did commit suicide.” Smith says flatly that he has no connection at all to the suicides, and he say the Defense Department, in charge of Guantanamo, may be trying to shift blame to him. It’s not only Smith’s ability to represent Gharani that has been destroyed: In the course of the investigation, the Navy has seized more than a thousand pages of documents from...07 Jan Mr. President, Tear Down that Prison
...is attributable to defense challenges, it does seem appropriate to consider whether a General Court-Martial would have in fact been more efficient. The second justification that no longer seems meaningful was the purported need for a “quasi-secret” process to protect evidence and participants. Considering the Department of Defense has willingly provided information about the legal and lay participants in the process, there seems little difference on this point between the Military Commission and the Court-Martial. As for the protection of evidence, the concern was essentially hollow from the outset, as...05 Apr The Problem with Saddam’s “The Executions Were Legal” Defense
...al-Jaafari asked Saddam about his approval for death sentences passed against the 148 by his Revolutionary Court, which prosecutors have argued gave the Shiites only a cursory trial. “That is one of the duties of the president,” Saddam replied. “I had the right to question the judgment. But I was convinced the evidence that was presented was sufficient” to show their guilt in the assassination attempt. As I have explained in more detail over at the Grotian Moment, there is a fatal flaw — literally — with Saddam’s defense: at...
06 Jun Illegitimate Alliances: Invasion Tales Within the United Nations Security Council
...sovereign state through utilizing either of the two exceptions to prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter: (1) UNSC authorization; and/or (2) use of force for the purpose of self-defence (under Article 51). Self-Defence: To Be Preventive or Pre-emptive? That Is the Question! Iraq’s ignorance in acting in conformity to the demands and purposes of Resolution 660 which condemned Iraq’s unlawful invasion to Kuwait, brought forth Resolution 678. The latter Resolution gave power to all member states to “use all necessary means to uphold...
17 Jun Prosecuting Aggression against Ukraine as an “Other Inhumane Act” before the ICC Part II: Problems
[ Giulia Pinzauti is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Leiden Law School’s Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. Alessadro Pizzuti (Twitter: @Aless_Pizzuti) is the co-founder and co-director of UpRights .] The authors would like to thank Miles Jackson and Daniel Gryshchenko for their help and suggestions for this post. Introduction Framing Russia’s unlawful use of force against Ukraine as an other inhumane act, via the violation of the right to self-determination, is not without implications and raises potential problems that need to be further explored. In this second...25 Apr The Legality Surrounding the US Strikes in Syria
...strikes with the United Nations (UN) Charter and the general prohibition on the use of force under international law. This post will focus on this last matter. Before delving into some of the key legal issues, it should be noted that the US strikes contrast with the position previously adopted by the US, whereby it directed its military force towards the fight against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) under its umbrella of ‘the war on terror’ on the basis of self-defence, as opposed to directing...
03 Nov The Ungovernance of Gaza
...actively seek to encounter, produce, and harness, their own indeterminacy (or the experience and expression of it) as a generative principle’. Such generative forms of ungovernance have been at the heart of Palestine’s predicament for decades. It was the Oslo Accords of 1993-1995 in particular that sanctioned a complex regime of (non)rule across the fragmented non-sovereign space of Palestine. Before this agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the predominant paradigms for international lawyers had been those of belligerent occupation and self-determination. These two paradigms were further reliant on...
17 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: A Rejoinder
...Covenant or UN Charter. They are meaningful, but what we do with them is more meaningful. When I draw a parallel between self-preservation and self-defence, it is to warn against the effects of extensive interpretations of Article 51. If one believes that the uses and abuses of self-preservation ‘eviscerated any putative rule of non-intervention’, then the book is an invitation to reflect critically on what we are doing now. This brings me to two questions, one by Helal and one by Ingo Venzke: Was the narrative successful in resuscitating confidence...