In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Humanitarian Law

02 May

[Adil Ahmad Haque is Professor of Law and Judge Jon O. Newman Scholar at Rutgers Law School. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] Suppose that a soldier from State A intentionally kills a civilian in State B. Maybe State A is fighting an international armed conflict against State B. Maybe State A is fighting a non-international armed...

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02 May

Erica Gaston is an international lawyer with the Global Public Policy institute (GPPi) and a non-resident fellow at the New America Foundation. She has been working in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict or post-conflict zones on the application of laws of war, human rights and other related issues since 2006. This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense...

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01 May

[Bruce ‘Ossie’ Oswald is Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law.This post is part of our week-long symposium on soldier self-defense and international law.] What follows is an outline of how the use of force in self-defence as a doctrine has evolved in UN peacekeeping operations. I focus on how the use of force...

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30 Apr

[Camilla G. Cooper (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Operational Law at the Norwegian Defence University College. Sigrid Redse Johansen is a Judge Advocate General of the Norwegian Armed Forces. Please note that the following was written in the authors' personal capacity and is not to be considered as an official Norwegian reply to the questions posed. This post is...

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29 Apr

[Hans Boddens Hosang is Deputy Director of Legal Affairs of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and Senior External Researcher at the Law of Armed Conflict and Military Operations (LACMO) Research Group, Amsterdam Center for International Law at the University of Amsterdam. Terry Gill is Professor of Military Law at the University of Amsterdam & the Netherlands Defence Academy and is...

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29 Apr

[Elvina Pothelet is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva, and a teaching assistant and researcher at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] It is tempting to think of soldier self-defense as a black hole in the galaxy of international law: in the same way as black holes grow continuously by absorbing mass from their surroundings, soldier self-defense seems...

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27 Apr

I thought I was done blogging about the Pre-Trial Chamber's authorization decision, but there is another aspect of it that keeps nagging at me: the limits PTC II would have imposed on the OTP's investigation if it had authorized it. Here are the key paragraphs (emphasis mine): 40. More specifically, the precise width and breadth of the Prosecutor's power to investigate...

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17 Apr

I have been thinking more about how the OTP can appeal the Pre-Trial Chamber's refusal to authorize the Afghanistan investigation. I was perhaps a bit too dour in my assessment of whether the Appeals Chamber is likely to get the chance to reverse a decision that I consider fundamentally flawed. The most obvious option would be to seek leave to appeal the...

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13 Apr

In my previous post, I defended the right of the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) to review  the OTP's assessment of whether there were, to quote Art. 53(1)(c) of the Rome Statute, "substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice." In this post, I want to explain why I think the PTC got that review completely,...

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12 Apr

Dov Jacobs has a typically excellent post at Spreading the Jam on the PTC's decision to reject the Afghanistan investigation. I agree with nearly all of it, but I do take issue with this comment: First of all, and perhaps most importantly, the exercise that the Pre-Trial Chamber did is most likely ultra vires. Indeed, Article 53(1)(c) is very clear that...

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12 Apr

I will write a longer post tonight criticising the PTC's understanding of the "interests of justice," but I thought I'd start by cutting to the legal chase: can the OTP appeal the PTC's decision to reject its request to investigate the situation in Afghanistan? As I read the Rome Statute, I don't think so. Here is the text of the relevant...

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