Precision War and Responsibility: Transformational Military Technology and the Duty of Care Under the Laws of War (original) (raw)

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Targeting, the Law of War, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice

2018

Allegations of civilian deaths or injury or damage to civilian property caused during combat operations require an investigation to determine the facts, make recommendations regarding lessons learned in order to prevent future occurrences, and recommend whether individual soldiers should be held accountable. Using the factual circumstances of the airstrike on the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital, this Article articulates how, in the context of targeting, a violation of the Law of War is made punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as explained by the recent Targeting Supplement promulgated by The Judge Advocate General of the Army.

Modern Warfare Under the Laws of War

From the dawn of civilisation to today, warfare has brought great destruction and terrible human suffering, affecting combatants and civilians, who frequently bear the brunt of war. Families have been torn apart, and entire generations have been damaged, dislocated, and dispirited by loss, violence, and abuse. Although armed conflict has been romanticised in heroic stories of liberation and revolution, those who have experienced the reality of war are often terribly troubled and traumatised. Melzer notes “for as much as war is exclusively human, it is also inherently inhumane”.1 There is nothing inevitable about the agony and desperation of victims of war; the international community has the ability and means to prevent this. A large corpus of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) has evolved to mitigate human suffering at war. In a world where conflict often spills across national borders, and with novel and unconventional forms of violence, the importance and necessity of this body of law has, perhaps, never been so great. As the face and practice of modern warfare are dramatically transformed by technology, the urge to ensure the protection of civilians becomes ever more pressing. The article begins with the chapter by Lean- dro Pereira Mendes, who presents the main principles and a brief history of the development of IHL. In the next chapter, Aris Vasilliou discusses the conflict in Eastern Ukraine regarding potential war crimes committed there by the parties of the conflict. In chapter three, Candela Fernández Gil-Delgado looks closely at the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, focussing on one specific situation: the right of self-determination, self-defence and the use of force. In chapter four, Christian Di Menna discusses the challenges and possible solutions vis-à-vis compliance with the principles and rules of IHL in situations of contemporary armed conflicts.

The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War--chapter 3

Oxford University Press, 2019

This book operates on two levels. On the more practical level, its overarching concern is to answer the question, When is it permissible to use lethal force to defend people against threats? The deeper concern of the book, however, is to lay out and defend a new account of rights, the mechanics of claims. This framework constructs rights from the premise that rights provide a normative space in which people can pursue their own ends while treating each other as free and equal fellow-agents whose welfare morally matters. According to the mechanics of claims, rights result from first weighing competing patient-claims on an agent, then determining if the agent has a strong enough agent-claim to act contrary to the balance of patient-claims on her, and then looking to see if special claims limit her freedom. The strength of claims in this framework reflects not just the interest in play but the nature of the claims. Threats who have no right to threaten have weaker claims not to be harmed than bystanders who might be harmed as a side effect, all else equal. With this model, a central problem in just war theory can be pushed to the margins: determining when people have forfeited their rights and are liable to harm. Threats may lack a right not to be killed even if they have done nothing to forfeit it. This chapter lays out the Mechanics of Claims. This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book, The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War, due for publication in 2019.