Usually when I blog about drones and extrajudicial execution, someone leaves a comment to the effect that terror suspects are "legitimate military targets" under the re-envisioned laws of war. The question of whether they are or aren't is a bit tricky, but since the...
Yesterday the ICRC released a report on the very scary and depressing trend of attacks on medical workers in situations of armed conflict and civil disturbances:According to Dr Robin Coupland, who...
Despite our modern ideas about a separation between civilians and soldiers in international law (and then complain about the breakdown of the legal distinction in counterinsurgency conflict or...
I've been thinking this weekend about Gary Solis' WAPO op-ed of Friday about CIA drone pilots being unlawful combatants - unlike drone pilots serving in the US armed forces who may arguably be...
The two different countries I call home (Canada and the UK) have recently had to deal with universal jurisdiction in relation to war crimes.First, as I’ve written about here, it has come to light that Canadian officials likely knew that Afghans captured by Canadian forces and subsequently transferred to Afghan prisons were being tortured. Failure to react to such allegations and relevations is a crime under the Third Geneva Convention Relative to Prisoners of War. Yet, what is interesting about this particular issue is that the Geneva Convention is quite clear that it is the government (as...
Cleitus the Black has an amusing post up at Elected Swineherd about parents who ask their children to honor the Geneva Conventions while playing violent video games such as Call of Duty. According to MSNBC:"Evan Spencer wanted to play 'Call of Duty: World at War.' So he asked his dad. Hugh Spencer wasn't initially thrilled about the idea of his son playing the World War II-based game. "I've never really enjoyed first-person shooter games," he confesses. "They're just not my favorite aesthetic." But the elder Spencer agreed to his son's request, on one condition: Evan would have to read all...
President Obama said a lot of important things tonight, but he also regurgitated a disturbing Bushism or two.* One of these is the term "America does not torture." Stated in this particular way, an indisputible statement of principle is conflated with and therefore masquerades as an empirical "fact," one which is blatantly untrue. This trope was one of the Bush Administration's many brilliant inventions, and was designed as a public relations counter-response to growing acknowledgement that US military and intelligence personnel not only had tortured detainees, but had in fact been ordered...
Lots went on in international criminal justice this past week. A few thoughts about three big news stories and a smaller one are below the fold.1) Omar Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court. I was less surprised by the fact that a sitting head of state might be charged than that the list of charges actually included genocide. Not because the facts on the ground don't suggest they should, but because of the nature of the crime and the nature of the court. a) Genocide is an "intent" crime - to convict you have to prove not just that atrocities occurred, but that they were...
After rejections from two other policy journals and ten days of wrangling with the editors, my first policy-article on the rules of war has just appeared in The National Interest. In a nutshell: "The arguments of the Bush administration when it comes to torture, prisoner-of-war status and extraordinary rendition have been met with outrage by the international community, constitutional scholars and human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, which has referred to Guantánamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times.' But the polarization of these two camps obscures the broad middle ground...
Steven Ratner has written a "Think Again" piece on the Geneva Conventions in the new issue of Foreign Policy. (This explains why FP rejected my proposal for a Think Again piece on the same topic about three months ago.)Ratner's list of assumptions that should be rethought include: "The Geneva Conventions are Obsolete""The Geneva Conventions Don't Apply to Al-Qaeda""The Geneva Conventions Turn Soldiers Into War Criminals""The Geneva Conventions Prevent the Interrogations of Terrorists""The Geneva Conventions Ban Asassinations""The Geneva Conventions Require Closing Guantanamo""No Nation...