Commander's Responsibility for the Delivery of Religious Support to the Detainees in the JAO: Accommodation of Religious Needs Balanced with the Necessary Security Concerns
Abstract : In recent operations, Regional Combatant Commanders (RCCs) have been tasked with new challenges in providing for the treatment, care, and accountability of detainees. Included in this tasking is the responsibility to insure detainees have the latitude to exercise their religious faith. This is an unfamiliar territory for many, and certainly not an art in practiced recent memory. These new challenges in relationship to religious support include understanding the boundaries set in the law of armed conflict, coming to terms with the definitions of detainees categories, religious support, and roles of providers, as well as understanding and tackling emerging concepts relating to enemy combatant detainees and the Global War on Terror. Headlines since 2002 have reminded us of the unintended consequences of what happens when we get it wrong. Remember the news stories of LT Saif-ul-Islam in Guantanamo Bay? We saw what happened when a chaplain trained at a tactical level, assigned to an operational staff, was given a role of great strategic significance.
Serving God and Caesar: Religious personnel and their protection in armed conflict
Résumé Les ministres du culte remplissent, dans les situations de conflit armé, une fonction particulière qui leur a valu non seulement de la reconnaissance, mais aussi une protection juridique. Cette protection, qui trouve son origine dans le droit religieux, est maintenant consacrée par le droit international séculier. Le personnel religieux attaché aux forces armées et exclusivement voué à son ministère doit être respecté et se voit accorder une protection spéciale en cas de conflit armé. Cet article examine le statut juridique actuel des aumôniers lorsqu'ils apportent une aide spirituelle aux combattants et aux prisonniers de guerre. L'auteur compare la protection dont ils jouissent à celle dont bénéficient les ministres du culte dans la société civile et évoque la possibilité de fusionner l'exercice du culte dans un contexte militaire avec celui du culte civil pour que les uns et les autres bénéficient d'une protection équivalente. Il analyse par ailleurs la fonction spécifique qu'exerce le personnel religieux dans les situations de conflit armé, son caractère religieux ainsi que les développements récents en matière d'aide spirituelle non confessionnelle. Il traite enfin des limites que le personnel religieux doit respecter pour préserver sa neutralité et de la situation particulière du personnel religieux exerçant son ministère auprès des personnes détenues à Guanténamo.
Human Rights Obligations and Transnational Corporations: The Limits of Direct Corporate Responsibility
To date, multinational corporations have had no direct human rights obligations under international law. Nonetheless, international lawyers can no longer ignore the increasing role of non-state actors in international society. This article suggests analysing existing mechanisms and new proposals for enhancing the accountability of transnational corporations, grouped into those focusing on the responsibility of the home and host states and those centred on the imposition of direct obligations on corporations. This article will specifically draw attention to the limits of some of the suggested normative changes, from a legal-theoretical perspective and in terms of their capacity to address effectively the challenges of the lack of respect for human rights laws.