On his blog, Bill Schabas raises a fascinating issue regarding the territorial scope of application of the Rome Statute of the ICC:

On 11 March 2010, the United Kingdom informed the Secretary-General that it wished that its ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ‘be extended to the following territories for whose international relations the United Kingdom is responsible: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands, St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, Turks and Caicos Islands’. The declaration added that the United Kingdom ‘considers the extension of the aforesaid Statute … to take effect from the date of deposit of this notification…’

The Argentine government then quite quickly objected to the UK declaration, because of their long-standing dispute over the Falklands/Malvinas. This has been the Argentine practice for quite some time (see, e..g, the similar UK and Argentine declarations with regard to the ICCPR (at the very end of the page)). But more interesting, as Bill notes, is the issue of the territorial scope of UK obligations:

Did the United Kingdom leave anything out of its declaration? What about Diego Garcia, which is part of the Chagos Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory. After expelling the inhabitants of the islands, the British then essentially handed over the base to the United States, which uses it as a kind of a fixed aircraft carrier. Is the Diego Garcia military base subject to the Rome Statute because it forms part of the ‘territory’ of the United Kingdom? Or does the recent declaration attempt to confirm that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Court, because the United Kingdom has not made a declaration to that effect?
Aside from jurisdiction over territory, there is also the issue of responsibility for arrest and other cooperation obligations under the Rome Statute. By its declaration, was the United Kingdom suggesting that it was not previously responsible for cooperation with the Court with respect to the territories listed in the declaration?

The formulation of the UK’s declaration certainly indicated that hitherto it considered itself bound by the Rome Statute only with respect to its metropolitan territory. But was this indeed the case? Or did the UK have all of the Rome Statute obligations conditioned by territory with regard to, say, Bermuda, from the moment of ratification? And what of the territorial jurisdiction of the ICC?

Up until the end of its empire after the Second World War the UK had a rather stringent policy of including so-called colonial clauses in the multilateral treaties to which it was a party. Thus, for example, it had the negotiating power to have such clauses included in the ECHR and the Genocide Convention. The UK was motivated in this partially by a policy desire to avoid assuming burdensome obligations for territories in which it did not want to apply them, and partially by a constitutional convention that it needed the assent of its dependencies for the extension of treaties to them. The UK’s efforts were resisted, however, in respect of other treaties, such as the ICCPR. With regard to those treaties, the UK employed the practice of filing a declaration that would specify the territories to which the the treaty would apply – as with the ICCPR, and now the Rome Statute.

(For general background on all of this (and some fantastic scholarship), see Brian Simpson’s Human Rights and the End of Empire (OUP, 2004), as well as L. Moor and AWB Simpson, ‘Ghosts of Colonialism in the European Convention on Human Rights’, (2006) 76 BYBIL 121.)

Now, the big question is whether such declarations have any effect – and in particular, whether the UK’s declaration with regard to the Rome Statute has such an effect. What these declarations try to do is to avoid the application of Article 29 VCLT, which reads ‘unless a different intention appears from the treaty or is otherwise established, a treaty is binding upon each party in respect of its entire territory.’

As explained by the ILC in its Draft Articles on the Law of Treaties, the ‘entire territory’ bit encompasses all territories over which a state has title, and not just its metropolitan territory. Art. 29 thus creates a rebuttable presumption that a treaty applies to all of the territories that belong to a state party.

Now, Art. 29 doesn’t explicitly deal with declarations of territorial scope as those routinely used by the UK. The Draft Articles do say, however, that:

One Government [I imagine the UK, but I haven't checked] proposed that a second paragraph should be added to the article providing specifically that a State, which is composed of distinct autonomous parts, should have the right to declare to which of the constituent parts of the State a treaty is to apply. Under this proposal the declaration was not to be considered a reservation but a limitation of the consent to certain parts only of the State. The Commission was of the opinion that such a provision, however formulated, might raise as many problems as it would solve. It further considered that the words “unless a different intention appears from the treaty or is otherwise established” in the text now proposed give the necessary flexibility to the rule to cover all legitimate requirements in regard to the application of treaties to territory.

So what are then we to do with the UK’s declarations? First, it does not regard them as reservations, but as ‘limitations on its consent’ only to parts of its territory. But isn’t a reservation precisely a limitation on state consent? A mere interpretative declaration cannot as such have direct effect on state obligations, as this territorial declaration purports to. Second, Art. 120 of the Rome Statute explicitly forbids any reservations. Third, whatever their nature, they might reflect the UK’s intention, but they certainly do not reflect that of the other parties, which is the Art. 29 VCLT criterion. Finally, and quite oddly, unless I am mistaken from my quick skim of the UN treaty collection, the UK made the ICC declaration only some 12 years after it ratified the Statute. How can this affect the consent that it had already given? It is only if a general rule existed to the effect that states can vary the territorial scope of their obligations via declarations – but as we have seen the ILC was quite explicitly opposed to such a rule, and the instability it potentially brings seems very much undesirable, and unsupported by state practice.

Then again, Denmark also made a similar declaration with respect to the Faroe Islands and Greenland, which it later withdrew, as did the Netherlands. No state objected to such declarations in principle, which might be taken as a inference that they are permissible, and would thus serve to rebut the Art. 29 VCLT presumption. This is, in short, quite a vexing little problem – and one that I doubt the Court will ever have the opportunity to resolve.

I was asked by the organizers of the 2010 ILA Conference in the Hague to put up this notice, and do so with pleasure. The Conference starts in a couple of days, and I’m sure it’ll be a wonderful event.

The 15^th – 20^th of August 2010 marks a historic moment for the Netherlands Society of International Law as it brings together over 600 lawyers from all over the world to discuss how international law and institutions can and should contribute to solving global problems.

The event – the 74^th Biennial Conference of the International Law Association – is being hosted in the Hague by the Netherlands Society of International Law as part of the events marking the 100^th year of its existence. The wide range of topics to be discussed at the panels of the conference include the international accountability of government lawyers for advice that  leads their governments to violate international law, the tensions between peace/reconciliation and justice before the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion in the Kosovo Case, current international law on piracy and the argument that Somali pirates are freedom fighters, the role of international law in global economic governance and financial supervision after the financial crisis, the ICC as either a court of last resort or simply a means for guaranteeing domestic proceedings are exactly like the ICC’s,  the enforceability or otherwise of the Millennium Development Goals and the role of international law in realizing those goals, the interplay between international human rights and national law in domestic litigation (plaintiffs’ and defendant’s perspectives), access to justice at the domestic level and the tension between local/national and international ideas of justice, the necessity or otherwise of an Organisation for the Prohibition of Biological Weapons (OPBW), the Sudan Abyei Arbitration as an example of international law arbitration as conflict prevention, Islamic finance and in general the role of religion in the making and practicing of law, forum based limitations to parties’ freedom of choice of applicable law in arbitration and a-national or transnational law as a possible solution thereto, and the relationship between the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the use or non-use of force in international law.

Alongside the panel discussions, there will be Open Working Sessions of the Committees and Study Groups of the ILA at which the various Committees and Study Groups will discuss the reports of their research on a variety of contemporary issues of international law. Committees which will be discussing their work include the Committees on Feminism and International Law, Islamic Law and International Law, Space Law, Non State Actors, Reparation for Victims of Armed Conflict, International Securities Regulation, International Law on Sustainable Development, Rights of Indigenous People, Legal Principles Relating to Climate Change, the Teaching of International Law,  International Civil Litigation and the interests of the public, Cultural Heritage Law, International Commercial Arbitration, International Criminal Court, International Family Law, International Human Rights Law, International Law on Biotechnology, International Protection of Consumers, International Securities Regulation, International Trade Law, Outer Continental Shelf, Recognition/Non-recognition in International Law and Responsibility of International Organizations. Most of the Committee and Study Group reports are already available on the ILA website and can be downloaded via http://www.ila-hq.org/en/committees/draft-committee-reports-the-hague-2010.cfm.

Updates on the conference will be available on the conference blog which can be accessed from the website of the conference (http://www.ila2010.org). Reports and resolutions adopted at the conference will be available later.

Conference details

Venue:  The Hague University of Applied Sciences (Haagsche Hoge School),

Johanna Westerdijkplein 75, 2521 EN, The Hague

Formal Opening: Monday, 16^th August at 9 a.m.

Our readers might wish to know that the the ICJ’s recent Order on the inadmissibility of Italy’s counter-claims in the Jurisdictional Immunities of the State case, that was buried under the deluge that was the Kosovo AO,  is available from today on the ICJ’s website, together with three separate opinions. The Order essentially deals with the temporal admissibility of claims under Article 1 of the European Convention for the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, and is in a way a sequel to the Certain Property (Liechtenstein v. Germany) case rejected by the Court a few years ago.

Editor’s Note: This is a featured post. Newer posts, including those in our online symposium on The Constitutionalization of International Law, appear below

The ICJ has now officially announced that it will deliver its advisory opinion in the Kosovo case on 22 July. This essay/post is intended to serve as a preview of the many issues raised in the case, of the main lines of argument by states before the Court, and of the several possible avenues that the Court might take in deciding the case. (more…)

Today the UK Supreme Court decided R (Smith) v Secretary of State for Defence [2010] UKSC 29 (press summary), yet another fascinating addition to the unfolding saga on the extraterritorial application of human rights treaties.

The plaintiff was the mother of a UK soldier stationed in Iraq who died there from a severe heatstroke. She demanded an inquiry into her son’s death that would be compliant with Article 2 ECHR, that would be able to expose what in her view were systemic faults in the UK’s provision of equipment and facilities to its soldiers in Iraq which ultimately led to her son’s death. In other words, the case is a mirror-image of Al-Skeini, which also dealt with Art. 2 procedural obligations in Iraq, but that time with respect to inquiries into the deaths of Iraqi nationals at the hands of UK troops. As the readers are aware, the Grand Chamber of the European Court held hearings in Al-Skeini just a few weeks ago (see my old post for more background).

With regard to extraterritoriality, the issue before the Supreme Court in Smith was this: does a UK soldier in Iraq enjoy the protection of the ECHR while stationed in an area not under the UK’s effective control? Incidentally, on the facts of the case, Private Smith actually died on a UK military base. Per the UK government’s concession in Al-Skeini, the House of Lords’ quite dubious analogy between a military prison or base and an embassy, and the European Court’s recent admissibility decision in Al-Saadoon, that fact alone would have brought Private Smith within the UK’s jurisdiction. Readers will recall that in Al-Saadoon the European Court brought the spatial model of Art. 1 jurisdiction as state effective overall control of a geographical area to its extreme, but saying that a military prison or base qualified as an ‘area’ susceptible to such jurisdiction and control.

In other words, under the spatial model Private Smith would have been within the UK’s jurisdiction, and therefore entitled to protection under Art. 2 ECHR. However, issue was raised in the lower courts as to whether he would have been within the UK’s jurisdiction even if he did NOT die on the base, but in essentially the same circumstances. Like the lower courts, therefore, the Supreme Court was now faced with a set of questions in a quasi-advisory posture – something that several judges openly lamented. The Court nonetheless decided to rule on the matter, because it is one of great practical relevance of UK military operations abroad; Private Smith is obviously not the only UK soldier to have died in Iraq or Afghanistan, and many soldiers lost their lives outside areas under UK effective control.

The lower courts applied to Private Smith a variant of the personal model of Art. 1 jurisdiction, as state authority and control over individuals, finding that he indeed fell within the scope of Art. 1. In their view, simply by virtue of being a part of the UK military, Private Smith was within the UK’s authority and control, and accordingly within its jurisdiction.

Today the Supreme Court disagreed. By a majority of 6 to 3 (Lady Hale and Lords Mance and Kerr dissenting), the justices found that mere membership in the armed forces was insufficient to establish a jurisdictional link for the purposes of Art. 1 ECHR.

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Today a Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in Schalk and Kopf v. Austria, no. 30141/04. The applicants alleged a violation of Art. 12, and Art. 8 combined with Art. 14, on the basis that Austrian law did not allow them, as a same-sex couple, to contract marriage. Notably, the applicants did not just claim that Austria denied them some specific legal rights and privileges of a married couple, by refusing to recognize their relationship at all – something that the European Court has regarded as discriminatory since its 2003 judgment in Karner v. Austria, and unjustifiable merely for the sake of protecting an abstract notion of the traditional family. Rather, their claim focused solely on their inability to enter into marriage as such. In other words, they argued that the definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman was as such discriminatory. (For more background, see this excellent post by Tobias Thienel on the oral hearings in the case).The Chamber rejected the applicants’ arguments.

The applicants first based their claim on Art. 12, arguing that the Court should interpret it in an evolving manner so as to now require the legal recognition of same-sex marriage (see here for more on evolutionary interpretation). The Court refused to do so, finding that (at least for the time being) the matter was left to the margin of appreciation of contracting states (paras. 54-64):

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Today the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held joint hearings in  Al-Skeini and others v. UK (no. 55721/07) and Al-Jedda v. UK (no. 27021/08) – webcast available here, statements of facts available here. It would be no exaggeration to say that these are some of the most important cases to come before the Court in recent years, with possibly wide-ranging implications, on matters ranging from the extraterritorial application of the ECHR and the use of force generally, to occupation and targeted killings, up to the responsibility of international organizations, the relationship between the ECHR regime and the UN Security Council under Article 103 of the Charter. The Court will probably deliver its judgments by the end of the year.

Let me now try to provide a preview of some of the most important issues – particularly threshold issues – that that the two cases raise, and of the possible ways in which the Court might rule.

(Again, apologies for a long post!)

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First off, some personal news – I am very happy to report that I will be taking up a lectureship at the University of Nottingham School of Law starting this September. It’s a truly excellent school, with some wonderful colleagues, and I do look forward to working there. Now, on to business:

The whole Gaza flotilla affair has occupied so much public attention and legal commentary that there has been little response so far to the publication of Prof. Philip Alston’s report to the Human Rights Council on targeted killings. The report is on any view a valuable contribution to the debate. Over at Opinio Juris, Ken Anderson has published a short ‘not-yet-response’ to the report, and I’d like to add a few thoughts of my own, mostly with regard to the relevance of self-defense.

The independent self-defense justification for targeted killings

As readers are aware, Ken has in the past argued for self-defense as an independent justification for (some) targeted killings. He has done so (and I am in full agreement with him on that point) because the justification offered by the Bush administration at the time, that it is engaged in some amorphous, global armed conflict with Al Qaeda and that it can kill combatants in that conflict, cannot justify the whole of the US targeted killings policy even if stretched to its utmost limit. In other words, even if we accept that there is such a thing as a global non-international armed conflict, the US has killed people, and thinks it needs to kill people, who have no connection whatsoever to that conflict. And there, says Ken, self-defense comes in.

Today, of course, Ken is not alone in so arguing – recently, at the last ASIL meeting, the legal adviser of the State Department, Prof. Harold Koh, has offered the same justification.

In a prior post, I argued that it is doubtful that self-defense can do all that Ken wants it to do. In particular, I argued that if the person being targeted has rights under human rights law, self-defense cannot preclude the wrongfulness of the killing. Rather, the killing would have to be justified within the human rights framework. If, on the other hand, human rights treaties did not apply, then there would be little need for self-defense.

Ken has responded to my critique by saying the following:

Meaning, Marko starts from two points – one is extraterritorial application of the ICCPR.  I don’t buy that, the US doesn’t buy it – and I don’t think its position unprincipled or ungrounded.  If one disagrees not just as to the view, but also as to whether it is a principled position or not, it seems hard to have traction in the rest of the discussion, with all admiration and respect to Marko.  Marko’s second point (really the first) went to self-defense as being about the state whose sovereignty is being violated, not the terrorists.  I truly think we – and the US – and Marko are on different, irreconcilable pages here; I can’t imagine the US thinking that the act of self-defense is anything other than aimed at the terrorists, and the violation of sovereignty of the local state is collateral to that.  It is a violation of that state’s sovereignty, but territorial integrity is not everything, as Sofaer said in his 1989 speech and Koh essentially reiterated.  But I think I must not understand Marko well, because I couldn’t understand how he meant self-defense.

Now I’d like to offer a rejoinder – in part because of a real disagreement between us, and in part to clarify what I think is, or may be, a misunderstanding, either linguistic or semantic, or perhaps legal and conceptual.

(Warning! long post — but hopefully not a boring one!)

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This is, remarkably, the question raised by yesterday’s judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Kononov v. Latvia, App. No. 36376/04. In short, the applicant was a former Soviet partisan convicted by a Latvian court for war crimes, because during World War II he and the unit under his command killed a group of Latvian villagers who collaborated with the Germans. The case raised many issues of the law of armed conflict/IHL, such as combatant and civilian status – but importantly, how the law applied inter-temporally, i.e. what the law was in 1944, when the alleged crime was committed.

The Chamber 4:3 judgment in favour of Kononov was much criticized for various methodological reasons, and not just for its ultimate result. The Grand Chamber reversed the Chamber’s judgment, finding in favour of Latvia by 14:3, and is technically of significantly better quality. The ultimate result of the case and some nitpicking I would have with certain elements of the Grand Chamber’s reasoning aside, what interests me the most is its basic approach, and the broader implications that it might have.

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I’d like to turn our readers’ attention to the comment thread of Constantin’s post, which has raised a fascinating issue – when does an internal armed conflict become internationalized? I’d like to add a few thoughts of my own, first on some matters of definition.

We first need to agree on what the ‘internationalization’ of an internal armed conflict actually means. To my mind, that concept is only legally useful if it denotes the transformation of a prima facie non-international armed conflict into an international one, thereby rendering applicable to the said conflict the more comprehensive IAC legal regime. As is well known, there has been a long-standing trend – promoted, for example, by the case law of the ICTY and the ICRC customary law study – of arguing that most of IAC rules now apply to NIACs as well.

Crucially, however, at least one distinction between the two legal regimes remains. In IACs, the parties to the conflict are (at least) two equal sovereigns. Lawful participants in the hostilities who in effect represent those sovereigns thereby have combatant status, and enjoy the privilege of belligerency. They cannot be prosecuted by the other party for their mere participation in the hostilities, but solely for violations of IHL. In NIACs, however, the parties are fundamentally different – most commonly a government and a rebellious non-state actor. Because governments have every right to suppress rebellions against them, no combatant status or privilege exists in NIACs. A rebel can be prosecuted for the mere fact that he is a rebel, even if he has been completely observant of the rules of IHL. Thus, for example, the government of Afghanistan has every right to imprison a Taliban soldier, even if that soldier committed no war crime.

Note that this distinction is based on party structure to the conflict and is therefore here to stay. Note also that because the distinction between IACs and NIACs is based on party structure, one cannot logically first ask the question (as Federico does in the comments) whether there is an armed conflict simpliciter, and the ask further whether that conflict is international or non-international. Rather, IACs and NIACs are separate legal categories, neither of which is residual in nature, as it is impossible to establish either without making an inquiry into party structure. In other words, an ‘armed conflict’ exists when there is an IAC or a NIAC, not the other way around.

Per Common Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, IACs are defined as conflicts between states. There are thus two basic ways of ‘internationalizing’ a NIAC: (1) for treaties and/or custom to exceptionally expand the definition of an IAC to include as parties some sufficiently state-like entities, or (2) for the non-state actor which is a party to a NIAC with a state to be considered as acting on behalf of a third state.

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