The German Ministry of Defense decided in 2000 to commission a study comparing various European systems of military law. The present book contains not only the original study but also all national reports in English. It provides a comparative analysis of different European military law systems on the basis of national reports.

The concept that certain objects and persons may be legitimately attacked during armed conflicts has been well recognised and developed through the history of warfare. This book explores the relationship between international law and targeting practice in determining whether an object is a lawful military target. By examining both the interpretation and its post-ratification application this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the definition of military objective adopted in 1977 Additional Protocol I to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions and its use in practice.

This book discusses the manner in which Britain's wars, which took place between 2000 and 2015, have interacted with the relevant principles of international law and English law for the purpose, primarily, of considering legal accountability. During a debate in the House of Lords in 2005 a former Chief of the Defence Staff commented that 'the Armed Forces are under legal siege.' The book will discuss the major legal issues which have arisen, ranging from the various votes in Parliament to go to war, the constitutional relationship between ministers and senior commanders, the right under international law to use force, the influence of human rights law, the role of the courts in England (including the coroners' courts), to the legal regime applying to the conduct of UK military operations. It will assess critically whether the armed forces will now have to accept that operations conducted outside the UK are subject to greater legal scrutiny than previously and whether, if this is the case, it is likely to hinder their future military activities. This book will be of great interest to scholars of international law, the law of armed conflict, military studies and international relations, as well as to those with a professional or other interest in the subject matter.

With the end of the Second World War a new world order arose based on the prohibition of military force in international relations, and yet since 1945 British troops have been regularly deployed around the globe: most notably to Korea, Suez, Cyprus, and the Falklands during the Cold War; and Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq since the fall of the Berlin Wall. British forces have been involved in many different capacities: as military observers, peacekeepers, peace-enforcers, state-builders and war-fighters. The decisions to deploy forces are political ones made within several constitutional frameworks, national, regional and international. After considering the various legal and institutional regimes, this book examines the decision to deploy troops from the perspective of international law.
In its military interventions Britain has consistently tried to utilize international law to justify its actions, though often it argues against orthodox interpretation of the laws. In gauging whether its actions are in breach of international law we can again make judgments at different levels using various forms of accountability - from judicial fora (for example the International Court of Justice in The Hague or the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg), to political ones (the UN General Assembly in New York or the House of Commons in Westminster). While this book examines international and regional mechanisms, tumultuous debates on the Suez crisis, Afghanistan, Iraq and others in the House of Commons and its Committees are highlighted to show how international law impacts upon domestic politics. In considering whether democratic accountability is effective in upholding the principles of international law, this book throws new light on an old democracy, and thereby makes a contribution to the current reform proposals that are aimed at improving democratic decision-making.

This book offers a novel contribution to the study of post-Cold War European defence. Interdisciplinary in approach, it uses the insights of EU law to assess the utility of existing theoretical accounts of European defence cooperation.Dyson and Konstadinides link legal and IR scholarship to undertake a detailed exploration of the structural factors which facilitate and hinder closer cooperation in the field of defence. Exploring the explanatory power of Neorealism, they focus on the balance of threat as a driver of the European Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). This book critiques the assumption inherent in governance accounts of CSDP that a transition from the 'sovereign' to the 'functional' will be possible in this policy area.European Defence Cooperation in EU Law and IR Theory sheds new light on the factors underpinning the development of the CSDP and the potential for more extensive cooperation in trans-Atlantic relations. The capacity of legal analysis to provide important empirical insight and of international relations theory to enrich legal scholarship by contextualizing it within its political context, makes this book of great relevance to scholars from both disciplines.

The concept that certain objects and persons may be legitimately attacked during armed conflicts has been well recognised and developed through the history of warfare. This book explores the relationship between international law and targeting practice in determining whether an object is a lawful military target. By examining both the interpretation and its post-ratification application this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the definition of military objective adopted in 1977 Additional Protocol I to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions and its use in practice. Tackling topical issues such as the targeting of TV and radio stations or cyber targets, Agnieszka Jachec-Neale analyses the concept of military objective within the context of both modern military doctrine and the major coalition operations which have been undertaken since it was formally defined. This monograph will be of great interest to students and scholars of international law and the law of armed conflict, as well as security studies and international relations.

Since the United States' entry into World War II, the federal judiciary has taken a prominent role in the shaping of the nation's military laws. Yet, a majority of the academic legal community studying the relationship between the Court and the military establishment argues otherwise providing the basis for a further argument that the legal construct of the military establishment is constitutionally questionable. Centering on the Cold War era from 1968 onward, this book weaves judicial biography and a historic methodology based on primary source materials into its analysis and reviews several military law judicial decisions ignored by other studies. This book is not designed only for legal scholars. Its intended audience consists of Cold War, military, and political historians, as well as political scientists, and, military and national security policy makers. Although the book's conclusions are likely to be favored by the military establishment, the purpose of this book is to accurately analyze the intersection of the later twentieth century's American military, political, social, and cultural history and the operation of the nation's armed forces from a judicial vantage.

Traditionally few people challenged the distinction between absolute and selective conscientious objection by those being asked to carry out military duties. The former is an objection to fighting all wars - a position generally respected and accommodated by democratic states, while the latter is an objection to a specific war or conflict - theoretically and practically a much harder idea to accept and embrace for military institutions. However, a decade of conflict not clearly aligned to vital national interests combined with recent acts of selective conscientious objection by members of the military have led some to reappraise the situation and argue that selective conscientious objection ought to be legally recognised and permitted. Political, social and philosophical factors lie behind this new interest which together mean that the time is ripe for a fresh and thorough evaluation of the topic. This book brings together arguments for and against selective conscientious objection, as well as case studies examining how different countries deal with those who claim the status of selective conscientious objectors. As such, it sheds new light on a topic of increasing importance to those concerned with military ethics and public policy, within military institutions, government, and academia.

This book offers a comprehensive argument for why pre-existing international law on cluster munitions was inadequate to deal with the full scope of humanitarian consequences associated with their use. The book undertakes an interdisciplinary legal analysis of restraints and prohibitions on the use of cluster munitions under international humanitarian law, human rights law, and international criminal law, as well as in relation to the recently adopted Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). The book goes on to offer an in-depth substantive and procedural analysis of the negotiations which led to the 2008 CCM, in part based on the author's experiences as an adviser to Cluster Munitions Coalition-Austria. Cluster Munitions and International Law is essential reading for practitioners and scholars of International Law, including International Humanitarian, Human Rights, International Criminal or Disarmament Law and anyone interested in legal and humanitarian perspectives on cluster munitions legislation and policy. It is unique in bringing a practitioner's perspective to a scholarly work.

State Violence and the Execution of Law stages a provocative analysis of how the biopolitical divide between human and animal has played a fundamental role in enabling state violence, including torture, secret imprisonment and killing-at-a-distance via drones. Analyzing the complex ways in which the United States government deploys law in order to consolidate and further imperial relations of power, Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalization of the state's monopoly of violence both in the US and in an international context. He demonstrates how networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions, military apparatuses, civilian sites, corporations, carceral architectures, and advanced technologies. The author argues that the exercise of state violence, as unleashed by the war on terror, has enmeshed the subjects of the Global South within institutional and discursive structures that position them as non-human animals that can be tortured, killed and disappeared with impunity. Drawing on poststructuralist, critical race and whiteness, and critical legal theories, the book is transdisciplinary in its approach and value. It will be invaluable to university students and scholars in Critical Legal and Socio-Legal Studies, Cultural Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, International Politics, and Postcolonial Studies.

A former Marine judge advocate and legal counsel to General Colin Powell, James Terry explores the genesis of the United States approach to terror violence and the legal foundation for the nation's response to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terry first reviews the entire spectrum of legal issues that arise before offering creative and practical legal and political solutions to counter terrorist activities. The author examines the development of rules of engagement and their application in the terrorist environment while differentiating the law of self-defense in this environment from more traditional conflicts. He also addresses the role of interrogation, and the line between harsh interrogation and torture, and the jurisdictional claims that arise. This volume examines a large number of topics related to the struggle and in a remarkably concise exploration, makes them understandable to experts in international law as well as those who do not have a strong background in the field. This text provides a serious but concise review of the legal issues in 20 interrelated chapters. All constitutional law scholars and political scientists will greatly benefit from reading this book. No other text offers such a comprehensive or detailed review of the issues arising from the War on Terror.

This book is an examination of American army legal proceedings that resulted from a series of moments when soldiers in a war zone crossed a line between performing their legitimate functions and committing crimes against civilians, or atrocities.

Using individual judicial proceedings held within war-time Southeast Asia, Louise Barnett analyses how the American military legal system handled crimes against civilians and determines what these cases reveal about the way that war produces atrocity against civilians. Presenting these atrocities and subsequent trials in a way that considers both the personal and the institutional the author considers how and why atrocity happens, the terrain of justification, and the degree to which the army and American society have been willing to take military crimes against civilians seriously.

Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia will be of interest to students, scholars and professionals interested in Military Justice, Military history and Southeast Asian History more generally.

A soldier obeys illegal orders, thinking them lawful. When should we excuse his misconduct as based in reasonable error? How can courts convincingly convict the soldier's superior officer when, after Nuremberg, criminal orders are ex-pressed through winks and nods, hints and insinuations? Can our notions of the soldier's "due obedience," designed for the Roman legionnaire, be brought into closer harmony with cur-rent understandings of military conflict in the contemporary world? Mark J. Osiel answers these questions in light of new learning about atrocity and combat cohesion, as well as changes in warfare and the nature of military conflict.

Sources of atrocity are far more varied than current law as-sumes, and such variations display consistent patterns. The law now generally requires that soldiers resolve all doubts about the legality of a superior's order in favor of obedience. It ex-cuses compliance with an illegal order unless the illegality--as with flagrant atrocities--would be immediately obvious to any-one. But these criteria are often in conflict and at odds with the law's underlying principles and policies. Combat and peace op-erations now depend more on tactical imagination, self-disci-pline, and loyalty to immediate comrades than on immediate, unreflective adherence to the letter of superiors' orders, backed by threat of formal punishment. The objective of military law is to encourage deliberative judgment. This can be done, Osiel sug-gests, in ways that enhance the accountability of our military forces, in both peace operations and more traditional conflicts, while maintaining their effectiveness.

Osiel seeks to "civilianize" military law while building on sol-diers' own internal ideals of professional virtuousness. He re-turns to the ancient ideal of martial honor, reinterpreting it in light of new conditions, arguing that it should be implemented through realistic training in which legal counsel plays an en-larged role rather than by threat of legal prosecution. Obeying Orders thus offers a compelling answer to the question that has most haunted the moral imagination of the late twentieth cen-tury: the roots--and restraint--of mass atrocity in war.

Historian Chris Bray (a former soldier) tells the sweeping story of military justice from the institution of the American court martial in the earliest days of the Republic to contemporary arguments over how to use military courts to try foreign terrorists or soldiers accused of sexual assault.

This book is a judicial, military and political history of the period 1941 to 1954. As such, it is also a United States legal history of both World War II and the early Cold War. Civil liberties, mass conscription, expanded military jurisdiction, property rights, labor relations, and war crimes arising from the conflict were all issues to come before the federal judiciary during this period and well beyond since the Supreme Court and the lower courts heard appeals from the government's wartime decisions well into the 1970s. A detailed study of the judiciary during World War II evidences that while the majority of the justices and judges determined appeals partly on the basis of enabling a large, disciplined, and reliable military to either deter or fight a third world war, there was a recognition of the existence of a tension between civil rights and liberties on the one side and military necessity on the other. While the majority of the judiciary tilted toward national security and deference to the military establishment, the judiciary's recognition of this tension created a foundation for persons to challenge governmental narrowing of civil and individual rights after 1954. Kastenberg and Merriam present a clearer picture as to why the Court and the lower courts determined the issues before them in terms of external influences from both national and world-wide events. This book is also a study of civil-military relations in wartime so whilst legal scholars will find this study captivating, so will military and political historians, as well as political scientists and national security policy makers.

Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of the U.S. Drone War focuses on the legal debate surrounding drone strikes, the use of which has expanded significantly under the Obama Presidency as part of the continuing war against terror. Despite the political salience of the legal questions raised by targeted killing, the author asserts that there has been remarkably little careful analysis of the fundamental legal question: the constitutionality of the policy. From a position of deep practical expertise in constitutional issues, Prof. Powell provides a dispassionate and balanced analysis of the issues posed by U.S. targeted killing policy, using the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011 as a focus for discussion. While Powell concludes that the al-Awlaki strike was constitutional under 2001 legislation, he rejects the Obama administration's broader claims of authority for its drone policies. Furthermore, he argues, citizens acting as combatants in al-Qaeda and associated groups are not entitled to due process protections: by due process standards, the administration's procedures are legally inadequate. A fundamental theme of the book is that the conclusion that an action or policy is constitutional should not be confused with claims about its wisdom, morality, or legality under international norms. Part of the purpose of constitutional analysis is to draw attention to these other normative concerns and not, as is too often the case, to occlude them.

Terror attacks on western civilian targets have stimulated interest in the dilemmas faced by liberal societies when combating threats to national security. Combining the perspectives of political science and law, this book addresses that discourse, asking how democracies seek to harmonize the protection of individual liberties with the defence of state interests. The book focuses on the experience of Israel, a country whose commitment to democratic values has continuously been challenged by multiple threats to national survival. It examines the legal, legislative and institutional methods employed to resolve the dilemmas generated by that situation, and thus provides a unique interpretation of Israeli national security behaviour. Policy-making and policy-implementation in this sphere, it shows, have reflected not just external constraints but also shifts in the domestic balance of power between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The book concludes with an agenda of the measures that each branch of government needs to implement in order to repair the flaws that have developed in this system over time. Based on a close reading of legislative and court readings, the book proposes a new taxonomy for the analysis of national security legal frameworks, both in Israel and elsewhere in the democratic world. As such it will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, national security law, Israeli history and civil-military relations.

A comprehensive analysis into the lawfulness of state-sponsored targeted killings under international human rights and humanitarian law, this book examines treaties, custom and general principles of law to determine the normative paradigms which govern the intentional use of lethal force against selected individuals in law enforcement and the conduct of hostilities. It addresses the relevance of the law of interstate force to targeted killings, and the interrelation of the various normative frameworks which may simultaneously apply to operations involving the use of lethal force.
Through a comprehensive analysis of treaties, custom and general principles of law in light of jurisprudence, doctrine and travaux preparatoires the author demonstrates that contemporary international law provides two distinct normative paradigms which govern targeted killings in situations of law enforcement and the conduct of hostilities. Based on the resulting normative paradigms, the author shows in what circumstances targeted killings may be considered as internationally lawful. The practical relevance of the various conditions and modalities are illustrated by reference to concrete examples of targeted killing from recent state practice.
The book argues that any targeted killing not directed against a legitimate military target remains subject to the law enforcement paradigm, which imposes extensive restraints on the practice. Even under the paradigm of hostilities, no person can be lawfully liquidated without further considerations. As a form of individualized or surgical warfare, the method of targeted killing requires a "microscopic" interpretation of the law regulating the conduct ofhostilities which leads nuanced results reflecting the fundamental principles underlying international humanitarian law.
The author concludes by highlighting and comparing the main areas of concern arising with regard to state-sponsored targeted killing under each normative paradigm and by placing the results of the analysis in the greater context of the rule of law.
*The author has conceived and written this book in an entirely personal capacity and independently from his function as a Legal Adviser in the Legal Division of the ICRC. The opinions expressed therein are his own and do not necessarily correspond to those held by the ICRC or its Legal Division.

The book serves as a companion to three other volumes published by Cambridge University Press, dealing respectively with the jus ad bellum, the law of belligerent occupation, and non-international armed conflicts. It is devoted to the core of the jus in bello - that is, the conduct of hostilities on land, at sea and in the air in inter-State armed conflicts - analyzed against the background of customary international law and treaties in force. The book deals with both means and methods of modern warfare. It addresses issues of general non-combatant protection, the principle of proportionality in collateral damage to civilians, and special protection, especially of the environment and cultural property. It also considers the relevant dimensions of international criminal law and deals with controversial matters such as unlawful combatancy, direct participation of civilians in hostilities and the use of 'human shields'. Case law and legal literature are cited throughout.

The area of telecommunications law historically meant the administration and regulation of telecommunications (telegraph and telephone) and broadcasting (radio, television, and cable) under the control of the CRTC and its predecessor agencies. Deregulation brought about immense changes, and since then the media themselves have changed and with them the regulatory focused subject area. Traditional media - telephone (wired and wireless), radio, television, cable, and DTH satellite communications - remain core components, even as they integrate and converge with other media in the milieu of digitization. Yet the nature and breadth of digitization has juxtaposed other areas of law and imbued them with substantial significance and relevance to telecommunications as a whole. This trend is reflected in this important new book by lone of Canada's leading specialists in the field.

The book will appeal not only to practitioners and students of telecommunications law but to industry professionals seeking a brader understanding of the legal environment in which they work.

A constant yet oftentimes concealed practice in war has been the use of informers and collaborators by parties to an armed conflict. Despite the prevalence of such activity, and the serious and at times fatal consequences that befall those who collaborate with an enemy, international law applicable in times of armed conflict does not squarely address the phenomenon. The recruitment, use and treatment of informers and other collaborators is addressed only partially and at times indirectly by international humanitarian law. In this book, Shane Darcy examines the development and application of the relevant rules and principles of the laws of armed conflict in relation to collaboration. With a primary focus on international humanitarian law as may be applicable to various forms of collaboration, the book also offers an assessment of the relevance of international human rights law.

Hitherto 'less-lethal' weapons, in contrast to classical firearms and other highly destructive weapons, have literally slipped under the radar of public international law. This book is the first monograph addressing and analysing all international legal regimes applicable to less-lethal weapons, ranging from arms control treaties, international humanitarian, criminal and human rights law. In doing so the different scenarios in which less-lethal weapons come to use will be taken into account, such as law enforcement, armed conflict and law enforcement scenarios during armed conflict. The relationships between the different legal regimes will be elaborated thoroughly with a view to examining how international law responds to less-lethal weapons. The final chapter provides guidelines as well as recommendations on appropriate use and regulation of less-lethal weapons, where the different scenarios of application, such as in armed conflict and law enforcement, will be given due account.

Gunfight is a timely work examining America s four-centuries-long political battle over gun control and the right to bear arms. In this definitive and provocative history, Adam Winkler reveals how guns not abortion, race, or religion are at the heart of America s cultural divide. Using the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation s capital as a springboard, Winkler brilliantly weaves together the dramatic stories of gun-rights advocates and gun-control lobbyists, providing often unexpected insights into the venomous debate that now cleaves our nation."