This post is part of our book discussion on Djemila Carron’s “L’acte déclencheur d’un conflit armé international“.
Dr. Djemila Carron has penned a significant book devoted to international armed conflicts. The great merit of Djemila Carron is to have exclusively focused on the notion of international armed conflict while nowadays most of the publications tend to examine mainly the concept of non-international armed conflict. In the recent years, legal literature has paid little attention to international armed conflicts. Dr. Carron rectifies this trend and brings back to the forefront of the legal discussion the notion of international armed conflict. This is all the more important as contemporary belligerency shows that, more and more, current situations are characterized by the intervention of third states, multinational forces or coalition of states in pre-existing armed conflicts. This inevitably raises questions about their characterization for the purposes of IHL.
Many issues covered by Djemila Carron’s book could have been the subject of legal discussions but within the framework of this brief post (which cannot do justice to the numerous legal issues raised in the book), I would like to focus on one particular aspect of the analysis conducted in this deep and thorough research: transnational armed conflicts against non-state armed groups and their potential classification as international armed conflicts.
To sum it up in a few sentences, Djemila Carron establishes first a presumption according to which the unconsented-to armed intervention of a state in the territory of another constitutes an international armed conflict but qualifies this presumption as rebuttable. She then argues that the presumption can be rebutted in three distinct circumstances, one of them being when resort to armed force by the intervening state is exclusively carried against a non-state organized armed group in the territory of another State. In such scenario, and in the absence of direct confrontation between the armed forces of the intervening State and those of the territorial State, the situation would only qualify as a non-international armed conflict according to Djemila Carron even when the territorial State has not consented to the third State’s military intervention. In this regard, Djemila Carron’s position echoes those recently put forward by Terry Gill, Kenneth Watkin and Sean Watts. Read the rest of this entry…
