Search: self-defense
01 Nov Conversation on WAR
...defend yourself. It can’t be that you can use as much force in self-defence that you think will be enough to finish them off forever, and they’ll never come back for 100 years. And because I’m acting in self-defence I can use as much force as I want. But that’s controversial. Some people seem to feel that once the conflict has started, and you have shown the necessity of self-defence, you can use as much force as you like within the rules of international humanitarian law, and that means that...
07 Mar Thou Shalt Not Distort the Language of International Law
...the purported “peace support functions” the shortest of their kind in history. On 22 February, President Putin signed the Federal Laws on the ratification of both treaties (see here and here). In accordance with Article 4 of both identical treaties, the Contracting Parties “shall provide each other with necessary, including military, assistance in the exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter”. “Self-Defence” In his televised address of 24 February 2022, President Putin mentioned “self-defence” as a justification for the...27 Mar International Week at SCOTUS: Will They Resolve the Self-Executing Treaty Puzzle?
...area of treaty law is messy for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say that there is substantial disagreement in the courts, and even more disagreement in the legal academy, as to how and whether to give a treaty self-executing effect. What the Supreme Court might (but probably won’t) do is clarify this very murky and fuzzy area of the law. Or, as is more likely, they may confuse matters even further. *For a defense of Scalia not recusing himself in Hamdan, see here....
09 Aug Muddying the Waters: A Reply to Kay and Kern on the Statehood of Palestine and the ICC – Part II
...agreed to allow the PLO, their political representatives, to establish institutions to exercise self-governing powers in the West Bank and Gaza. This was pursuant to the Declaration of Principles (DoP), in which Israel and the PLO agreed that the aim of the negotiations was to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, “for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338”. It was also agreed that the...30 Aug Why Do Treaties Create Private Rights of Action?
...even though the treaty was self-executing, and thus part of the supreme Law of the land, its provisions failed to overcome a standing presumption against private rights of action: To determine whether a treaty creates a cause of action, we look to its text. S ee United States v. Alvarez-Machain , 504 U.S. 655, 663 (1992) (“In construing a treaty, as in construing a statute, we first look to its terms to determine its meaning.”). The Treaty of Amity, like other treaties of its kind, is self-executing. See Medellín v....21 Oct Turkey’s Operation “Peace Spring” and International Law
...State may invoke self-defence only when it has been the victim of an “armed attack”. If that condition is satisfied, any defensive use of force is subject to the requirements of necessity and proportionality (ICJ Nicaragua, para. 194). A State that acts in self-defence without respecting these conditions and requirements violates the prohibition of the use of force under article 2(4) of the UN Charter and customary international law. In most serious cases, such use of force may qualify as an act of aggression. Turkey identified the following circumstances as...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...
23 Aug Symposium on The Sentimental Life of International Law: On Intimacy and Distance
...foundation of distance – and yet at the same time a constant invocation of virtuous life-saving possibilities. As David Kennedy, Janet Halley, and others have suggested, this contradiction produces a systematic failure to assess the distributional consequences of humanitarian work: the virtue of the work is meant to override the violence it produces. Yet the self-conscious integration of consequences, Simpson suggests, can also lead to cynical self-presentation. His own experience with this, he says, was a paper he gave in 2002 focusing on the “misuse” of international law in the...