International Humanitarian Law

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Targeted Killings: New Allegations Against India and Ukraine

Yesterday, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, stood up in Parliament and formally accused the government of India of committing a targeted killing on Canadian territory. The victim, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was a prominent leader of a Sikh separatist movement in India, who was designated as a terrorist by the Indian government. He was assassinated in June in front of a Sikh temple. From an international law standpoint, this kind of public accusation raises two sets of issues. The first is attribution, which can be legal, technical, and political; for our purposes, the key question is the identity of the assassins and the nature of their link to the Indian government (were they, for example, individuals who worked for Indian intelligence services, i.e. state organs, or were they contractors of some kind, acting allegedly under the Indian state’s instructions, direction or control). Related to this question, but conceptually distinct from it, is the issue of the evidence supporting an attribution claim. In the context of an accusation of this…

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The United States’ Practical Approach to Identifying Customary Law of Armed Conflict

The following post is part of a symposium based on a conference panel that discussed issues of customary law of armed conflict, at the 4th Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Military Advocate General (MAG) Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict, held in Herzliya, Israel, during May 8-10, 2023. The post is based on the author’s presentation in the…

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The Legal Fiction of the Two-Element Approach: The Role of International Organizations in Customary IHL Identification

The following post is part of a symposium based on a conference panel that discussed issues of customary law of armed conflict, at the 4th Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Military Advocate General (MAG) Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict, held in Herzliya, Israel, during May 8-10, 2023. The post is based on the author’s presentation in the…

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Identifying Customary LOAC in Practice

The following post is part of a symposium based on a conference panel that discussed issues of customary law of armed conflict, at the 4th Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Military Advocate General (MAG) Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict, held in Herzliya, Israel, during May 8-10, 2023. The post is based on Colonel…

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Changes in Treaty Interpretation: The ICRC’s Updated Commentaries to the Geneva Conventions

Last Saturday (12 August) marked the 74th anniversary of the adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the protections to be accorded to victims of armed conflict. With 196 states parties, the four Geneva Conventions are (together with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) the most widely ratified of all treaties, with more…

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