Non-State Actors

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The Legality of Turkey’s Possible Self-Defence Action against ISIS: A Response to Ashley Deeks

June 25, 2014

Sina Etezazian is a PhD Candidate at Monash Law School. In a recent blog post at Lawfare, Professor Ashley Deeks analyses the manner in which Turkey may lawfully protect the Turks taken hostage by the jihadist group ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria).  She contends that ‘if the Maliki government loses total control of the country, Turkey almost certainly would be legally justified in using force in Iraq to rescue its nationals’ in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter.  She also takes the view that the forcible protection of citizens abroad may be equated with permissible self-defence when: (1) the nationals in question face imminent threat of (or have suffered actual) injury; (2) the host state is unwilling or unable to protect or rescue them; and (3) the action of the intervening state clearly is limited to the goal of rescuing its nationals – that is, it is not engaging in pretextual intervention. However, Deeks is on shaky legal ground concerning the…

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Non-State Armed Groups in NIAC: Does IHL Provide Legal Authority for the Establishment of Courts?

June 4, 2014

Court of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam The recent Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defencecase has prompted a number of interesting and insightful posts addressing the issue of whether international humanitarian law (IHL) provides a legal basis for detention in Non-International Armed Conflicts (NIAC) (see, for example, here, here,…

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Locating the Legal Basis for Detention in Non-International Armed Conflicts: A Rejoinder to Aurel Sari

June 2, 2014

Last month, in response to the decision of the English High Court in Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defence (see Marko’s commentary here), we wrote a piece arguing that Mr Justice Leggatt correctly concluded that international humanitarian law (IHL) does not provide a legal basis to detain in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs). We argued (contrary…

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Sorry Sir, We’re All Non-State Actors Now: A Reply to Hill-Cawthorne and Akande on the Authority to Kill and Detain in NIAC

May 9, 2014

The recent High Court judgment in the case of Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defence [2014] EWHC 1369 (QB) has sparked a lively debate about the authority to detain individuals in the context of a non-international armed conflict (NIAC). In response to a post by Kubo Mačák offering a critical perspective on Mohammed, Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne…

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Special Agreements Concluded by Armed Opposition Groups: Where is the Law?

February 27, 2014

Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions binds the parties to non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) without making any distinction between the obligations of States and those of armed opposition groups (AOGs). Additionally, it encourages the parties to expand their obligations by concluding special agreements in order to bring other provisions of the GCs into force. These agreements’…

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