1,721,032 research outputs found
Articles of War
No full textImages of the million or more persons who have fled toward neighboring States highlight the tragic humanitarian impact of the ongoing armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia. However, a worse fate could await those unable to flee. Despite a slower than expected advance, Russian forces appear to be maneuvering to lay siege to several Ukrainian cities. While reports indicate the port city of Mariupol is already under siege, cut off from critical supplies and support
International Law Studies
No full textThe historical record of international weapons law reveals both regulation-tolerant weapons and regulation-resistant weapons, identifiable by a number of criteria including effectiveness, novelty, deployment, medical compatibility, disruptiveness and notoriety. This article identifies these criteria both to explain existing weapons law and to facilitate efforts to identify weapons that may prove susceptible to future law of war regulation. By charting the history, methodology, and trends of weapons law this article offers a starting point for identifying sound investments of the very precious legal, diplomatic, political and financial capital required to produce meaningful law of war developments.540-6219
Virginia Journal of International Law
No full textThe national security implications of computer network attacks (CNA) have become far-reaching and have prompted major adjustments to our nation's defense structure and strategy. One of the current President's early executive acts created a national Cyberczar to coordinate U.S. defenses against CNA. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has recognized cyberspace as a realm of combat operations equivalent in importance to land, sea and space, creating a new Cyber Command believed to be capable of launching offensive CNA. This article examines the critical question of combatant status in such CNA -- specifically, who, under the existing law of war, may lawfully participate in CNA? Existing accounts evaluate combatant status in CNA under traditional criteria applicable to kinetic and line-of-sight warfare. This article argues such approaches are outmoded and induce states to engage in practices that amount to no more than empty formalism. With historical, textual, and normative analysis, this article argues that state sanction or imprimatur is an appropriate standard for evaluating combatant status in CNA. The analytical framework proposed not only aligns with existing law and emerging state practice, but may also resolve the question of status in other remote combat engagements.2391-4475
Israel's Mechanisms for Examining and Investigating Complaints and Claims of Violations of the Laws of Armed Conflict According to International Law
No full textThis report responds to interrogatories provided by the report sponsors concerning United States law of armed conflict investigation and prosecution practices and policies. Where possible the report relies onprimary sources such as statutes or regulations. Occasionally, the report relies on secondary sources to identify primary sources not publicly or immediately available. Observations made without citations to authority are generally based on the author's personal experience as a military lawyer. The report draws exclusively from unclassified or declassified materials available in the public domain. The report does not account for classified materials or practices and investigations not lawfully made public. To that effect, the report does not rely on classified U.S. materials recently published by the Wikileaks organization.Second Report of The Public Commission to Examine the Maritime Incident of 31 May 2010485-56
International Law Studies
No full textNewly created State cyber security agencies, the reality of cyber attacks, and evolutions in cyber attack strategy will have important effects on the UN Charter's security regime, specifically the law governing States' resort to self-defense. In particular, low-intensity computer network attacks (CNA) confound efforts at correlation, frustrate attribution, and often manage to remain below States' response thresholds, both technical and legal. This paper identifies effects that an emerging emphasis on low-intensity CNA will have on legal conceptions of self-defense, focusing on the doctrine's relevance to attacks by non-state actors and the threshold of "armed attack." Showcasing the 2007 Estonian and 2008 Georgian attacks, this paper suggests that emerging low-intensity CNA doctrine casts new light on cyber disruptions previously thought to be below the threshold of self-defense. More significantly, it forecasts that proliferation of low-intensity CNA will produce a complex, multipolar security environment likely to produce grim effects on what little coherence and efficacy the existing UN Charter-based doctrine of self-defense enjoys.59-878
Military Law Review
No full textThe structural role of law-of-war perfidy is widely unappreciated and misunderstood. More than a prohibition of underhanded or dishonorable conduct, the prohibition of perfidy is an essential buttress to the law of war as a medium of exchange between combatants ? a guarantee of minimum respect and trust between belligerents even in the turmoil of war. Indeed, it may be difficult to conceive of an operative or effective war convention at all without guarantees against and protections from perfidy. Yet most existing conceptions of perfidy, whether drawn from treaty, military legal doctrine, or legal scholarship, merely restate imprecise codifications or offer little more than a vague sensibility. Amid seismic shifts in the conduct, scale, participants, and means of warfare, States have codified progressively narrower conceptions of perfidy, ultimately incorporating discrete legal elements into the offense. This article argues that a principled conception of perfidy that protects minimal concerns of humanity and preserves the law of war as a scheme of minimum good faith between adversaries is at once highly elusive but critical to the future of regulated violence.106-17521
International Law Studies
No full textLegal voids exist and operate nowhere more clearly and widely in international law than in the laws of war applicable to non-international armed conflicts (NIAC). Status of government actors in NIAC provides an intriguing and specific example of just such a void. Where the protections and obligations of the law of armed conflict are premised almost entirely on the status of affected persons, the law of NIAC spurns such classifications, as well as the taxonomy of status-based protection generally. Yet modern forms of conflict and State practices may soon place pressure on the NIAC status void. Increasing media attention, growing international oversight, and progressively heightening sensitivity to the suffering produced by NIAC conspire to match the legal protective regime of NIAC with that of international armed conflict, including perhaps the latter's use of status. This article offers explanations of the likely influences behind the NIAC status void and offers logical, structural, and operational arguments in its defense. The article concludes by addressing a series of considerations related to generalizations about international legal voids as an opportunity to reflect more deliberately on an appropriate interpretive approach to the law of NIAC.145-18
- …
