International Humanitarian Law Series – Serie

Challenging the perception that women are exclusively the victims, the caregivers or the passive supporters of men in times of armed conflict, Listening to the Silences: Women and War exposes the reader to a diversity of women’s voices. These voices, both personal and academic, demonstrate that women are increasingly taking on less ‘traditional’ roles during war, and that these roles are multifaceted, complicated and sometimes contradictory. The experiences of a judge, forensic anthropologist, survivor of sexual slavery, soldier, activist, journalist, humanitarian worker and others provide the reader with the opportunity to consider the depth of women’s involvement in armed conflict. Their voices highlight the fact that the international community at large has historically failed to listen to women, even as they have tried to tell their own individual tales of horror, heroism, courage, devastation, betrayal, violence and integrity during armed conflict. Concurrently the book examines in detail the legal infrastructure in this area, including debates on the adequacy of international law; developments in jurisprudence and the implementation of international resolutions.This book reveals that responses to women’s requirements during times of war will continue to be inadequate so long as we persist in silencing these differing perspectives and fail to take account of women’s dynamic and changing needs during war. Listening to the Silences: Women and War is a collection of women’s voices, each of which makes a unique contribution to a topic that is gathering international momentum and interest.The perspectives of these women greatly enhance our understanding of the gendered dimensions of armed conflict - they help to move the discourse beyond silence and towards inclusion, greater understanding and peace.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Sir Richard May, who passed away on 1 July 2004, and to the rich legacy he has left behind in the area of international criminal law. It contains in-depth analyses of a range of issues critical to the development and understanding of international criminal law, written by contributors who worked in some way with Sir Richard during his tenure at the ICTY, particularly during his last years as Presiding Judge of the Milošević Trial. It contains a Foreword by the President of the ICTY, Theodor Meron, and substantive work in three main parts: one chapter concerning the development and understanding of human rights; five chapters addressing international criminal law issues in the context of ICTY proceedings; and two chapters focusing on substantive aspects of international criminal law. All the chapters analyse international criminal law as applied by the ICTY, as well as the ICC, ICTR and other international or hybrid criminal tribunals, and are all authored by persons in a position to give great insight into the subject matter discussed.

This book examines UN naval peace operations, addressing the construction and assessment of authority with respect to a range of acts essential to the conduct of such operations. The focus is particularly upon operations as they relate to and impact upon the Territorial Sea. Within a conceptual approach emphasising the interaction of power and legitimation in the construction of authority, naval peace operations issues such as Innocent Passage, interdiction operations, and transitional administration are considered. The book concludes by proposing a conceptually and operationally sensitive approach to constructing authority for the conduct of UN naval peace operations in the Territorial Sea.

In 2009 it was ten years since the adoption of the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of an Armed Conflict. To celebrate this anniversary, a variety of contributions, focussing on the legal and cultural aspects of the Protocol are presented by Van Woudenberg and Lijnzaad. The innovative aspects of the Second Protocol such as enhanced protection, criminal responsibility and jurisdiction, and the protection of cultural property in armed conflicts not of an international character are addressed. Some country-specific studies are included. It is hoped that this publication will inspire States to accede to the Protocol and that it will serve as a source of inspiration to legal advisers, military personnel and cultural property experts.

During the last decade, the image of war correspondents in the news has shifted dramatically. Reports are no longer full of cheerleading stories of embedded journalists. Instead, stories of war reporters being attacked, kidnapped or injured prevail. Sadly, the former heroic witnesses to war have become victims of their own story. In this book, Nina Burri provides the first comprehensive analysis on how international law protects professional and citizen journalists, photographers, cameramen and their support staff during times of war. Using examples from recent armed conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Gaza and Syria, Burri explores the means, methods and risks of contemporary war coverage and examines the protection of news providers by international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law.

Detention of Non-State Actors engaged in Hostilities: The Future Law explores legal dilemmas facing detention management during military missions overseas. Armed forces increasingly find themselves facing non-international armed conflict with non-state actors, such as insurgents, terrorists or other civilians, whom they might be permitted to kill or capture in some circumstances. The book considers the legal powers of military forces to apprehend non-State actors and to hold them in ongoing detention or to transfer them to judicial authorities for prosecution. It deals with both theoretical approaches and practical case studies concerning management and treatment of detainees. It concludes by synthesizing the options and delivering a detailed set of guidelines that are proposed as emerging norms for the detention of non-state actors in an armed conflict.

Ai Kihara-Hunt’s Holding UNPOL to Account: Individual Criminal Accountability of United Nations Police Personnel analyzes whether the mechanisms that address criminal accountability of United Nations police personnel serving in peace operations are effective, and if there is a problem, how it can be mitigated. The volume reviews the obligations of States and the UN to investigate and prosecute criminal acts committed by UN police, and examines the jurisdictional and immunity issues involved. It concludes that these do not constitute legal barriers to accountability, although immunity poses some problems in practice. The principal problem appears to be the lack of political will to bring prosecutions, as well as a lack of transparency, which makes it difficult accurately to determine the scale of the problem.

Aside from self-defence, a UN Security Council authorisation under Chapter VII is the only exception to the prohibition on the use of force. Authorisation of the use of force requires the Security Council to first determine whether that situation constitutes a ‘threat to the peace’ under Article 39. The Charter has long been interpreted as placing few bounds around how the Security Council arrives at such determinations. As such commentators have argued that the phrase ‘threat to the peace’ is undefinable in nature and lacking in consistency. Through a critical discourse analysis of the justificatory discourse of the P5 surrounding individual decisions relating to ‘threat to the peace’ (found in the meeting transcripts), this book demonstrates that each P5 member has a consistent definition and understanding of what constitutes a ‘threat to the peace’.

In NATO Rules of Engagement, Camilla Guldahl Cooper offers clarity on a topic prone to confusion and misunderstanding. NATO rules of engagement (ROE) are of considerable political, strategic and operational importance, yet many of its concepts lack clarity. The resulting ambiguity may be detrimental for people involved and for mission accomplishment.Through a thorough analysis of the concept, purpose, development and use of NATO ROE, Cooper contributes to improved understanding and implementation of NATO ROE. The book covers all use of force categories and relevant law relating to the use of force during armed conflicts, including the complex concepts of hostile act and hostile intent, direct participation in hostilities, and the increasing reliance on self-defence during armed conflict.

The book provides an empirical account of the laws that regulate today’s scenes of armed conflict by looking into the details of one particular military incident and its ex-post legal accounting. Empirically, the book focuses on a highly controversial airstrike in Afghanistan (2009), in which large numbers of civilians were identified as combatants and killed as such. The incident lends itself to reflect upon the relation between the violation of procedural rules and the violation of the international laws of armed conflict. The ethnomethodological Law-in-Action research investigates the practical details of legal accountability and explores how the event shaped and specified the legally required protection of civilians in armed conflict. Exploring the collaborative and systematic work that goes into the ‘application of law’ at the military and the judiciary site, the study develops an empirical respecification of the concept of ‘juridification of warfare’.

How international is international humanitarian law? The Laws of Yesterday's Wars 2: From Ancient India to East Africa, together with its companion volume, The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars: From Indigenous Australians to the American Civil War (Brill-Nijhoff, 2021), attempts to answer that question. It offers a culture-by-culture account of various unique restrictions placed on warfare over time. Containing essays by a range of laws of war academics and practitioners, it approaches the laws of yesterday’s wars from a wide cross-section of history and culture, seeking to find any common ground and to demonstrate a history of international law outside the usual confines of its ‘development’ by Europeans and its later ‘contributions.’ This volume includes studies on Japanese, Islamic and Eastern Native American rules of war.

How international is international humanitarian law? The Laws of Yesterday's Wars 3: From Highland New Guinea to the Island of Malta, together with its companion volumes, The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars: From Indigenous Australians to the American Civil War (Brill-Nijhoff, 2021) and The Laws of Yesterday's Wars 2: From Ancient India to East Africa (Brill-Nijhoff, 2022), attempts to answer that question. It offers a culture-by-culture account of various unique restrictions placed on warfare over time. Containing essays by a range of laws of war academics and practitioners, it approaches the laws of yesterday’s wars from a wide cross-section of history and culture, seeking to find any common ground and to demonstrate a history of international law outside the usual confines of its ‘development’ by Europeans and its later ‘contributions.’ This volume includes studies on Mongol, Iban and Ottoman rules of war.

The 'original sin' of the laws of war - its exclusion of non-Europeans from its protection - shapes discussions around criminal liability for conduct during colonial expansion. This monograph disproves this position however, utilising State practice across various colonial frontiers that fell to Pax Britannica. In doing so, the groundbreaking research highlights eight clear customary colonial wars that applied to 'the other' across the Empire on Which the Sun Never Set.

This book conducts the first ever comprehensive study of the ICRC’s interpretations and law-ascertainments. It analyses in detail their impact on the development of international humanitarian law and international law in general as well as the reasons for their impact. This analysis involves the discussion of the ICRC’s authority. Is it legal or just factual authority? The analysis also illuminates the direction that IHL – and international law in general – develops. This insight sheds light on the question of the current type of international law, i.e., what international law is and who makes it.

Fragmentation and methodological inconsistency are already evident in the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Part of the solution is to use the principle of systemic integration to interpret crimes consistently with customary international law. This book provides novel data on the ICC’s compliance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, focusing on how the failure to interpret war crimes consistently with custom leads to unnecessary fragmentation and misses important opportunities to clarify and develop the law. It offers a detailed case study on the war crime of denying a fair trial, tracing its interpretive foundations from the Vienna Convention to the Rome Statute to the administration of justice by rebel groups in Timbuktu.

This book assesses whether humanitarian-intervention exists under customary international law. The main question being whether there is a right to humanitarian-intervention, and if so, according to what criteria, using historical analysis to determine its existence. By combining historical and legal methods running from the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire through to the contemporary Russia-Ukraine War, this book determines that such a right has been extinguished under international law.

Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS) are no longer limited to science fiction. Conflicts in the Ukraine and Gaza demonstrate an increased trend toward the use of autonomy in the use of force in armed conflict. This book analyses the art 36 legal review obligation and assesses how states can determine the legality of AWS. It proposes a new ‘functional’ approach to legal review that considers both weapons law and targeting rules engaged by the autonomous functionality.