Pre-emptive Self Defence

With missile and aerial strikes across Ukrainian territory and Russian ground forces entering Ukraine from multiple directions, there is now no doubt that the Russian Federation has used ‘force’ in the sense of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter against Ukraine, and has done so on a large scale. The burden is now on Russia to attempt to…

I am glad that Marko has taken on the task of tackling the issue of mistakes of fact in international law, as I completely agree that it is a very important yet so far largely overlooked aspect, surprisingly so. While I’d mostly approve of Marko’s deliberations and conclusions, I wanted to add a brief point that I…

  To briefly recapitulate our examination of mistake of fact when using lethal force in various sub-fields of international law: such a doctrine is, in its purely subjective form, black letter law in international criminal law. It is also established (even if not labelled as such) in international human rights law and (somewhat less clearly) in international humanitarian…

  If a state believes that it is the target of an ongoing or imminent armed attack and uses force to repel that attack, but it later turns out that it was mistaken and that there either was no such attack or that there was no necessity to respond to it, is that use of force in putative…