Use of force
Use of force is a politically sensitive and legally undetermined topic. It is therefore not surprising that it constitutes a highly controversial issue. During the Cold War, various critical debates about the legality of military interventions (Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Palestine, Afghanistan) were prevalent. These controversies did not disappear in the 1990s (Yugoslavia) nor in the 2000s (Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel/Lebanon, Russia/Georgia, among others). A general assessment of the numerous books and articles dedicated to this issue reveals a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, no one really contests that the use of force is strictly forbidden in contemporary international law. This prohibition is recognized as a core rule of the law of nations, and even a rule of imperative international law (jus cogens). Indeed, it seems difficult to conceive any kind of legal order without at least affirming that its subjects cannot attack one another. The prohibition of the use of force is also logically linked to the notion of external sovereignty, aiming both at protecting the identity and the personality of every state and at preserving individuals “from the scourge of war” (preamble of the UN Charter). On the other hand, there are, to say the least, a great variety of interpretations of the rule. Are collective security and self-defense the only exceptions in allowing states to use force? Is the Security Council the only authority able to authorize states to use force? Under what conditions are states able to invoke self-defense? Those questions seem difficult to address, as the conventional sources are rather limited: Article 2(4) and Chapters VII and VIII of the UN Charter are far from providing explicit answers to all the questions raised. Thus, the answers can be found mainly in customary international law, with all the difficulties surrounding the task of establishing that law.
Self-Defense Against an Imminent or Actual Armed Attack By Nonstate Actors
There has been an ongoing debate over recent years about the scope of a state’s right of selfdefense against an imminent or actual armed attack by nonstate actors. The debate predates the Al Qaeda attacks against the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the United States on September 11,2001, but those events sharpened its focus and gave it greater operational urgency. While an important strand of the debate has taken place in academic journals and public forums, there has been another strand, largely away from the public gaze, within governments and between them, about what the appropriate principles are, and ought to be, in respect of such conduct. Insofar as these discussions have informed the practice of states and their appreciations of legality, they carry particular weight, being material both to the crystallization and development of customary international law and to the interpretation of treaties.
Detention Operations in Contemporary Conflicts: Four Challenges for The Geneva Conventions and Other Existing Law
In September 2010, President Jakob Kellenberger of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) summarized the conclusions of a two-year, internal ICRC study of changes that have occurred in the nature of armed conflict since the signing of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, and he also suggested how international humanitarian law (IHL) should respond to those changes. In a previous address marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, Kellenberger had observed that in the place of traditional conflicts between state-sponsored armies on a battlefield, modern conflicts frequently involve nonstate actors, such as terrorist groups—a development that has blurred the line between civilians and combatants, and created challenges for IHL. The ICRC study concluded that IHL generally provides a suitable legal framework for regulating armed conflict.