Joint Blog Series on International Law and Armed Conflict: Bobby Chesney on “When Does LOAC Cease to Apply”

As indicated earlier this week, EJIL:Talk! is partnering with Lawfare and Intercross (blog of the International Committee of the Red Cross) to publish a series of posts arising out of the 2nd Transatlantic Dialogue on International Law and Armed Conflict (which took place in Oxford in July of this year). On Wednesday Bobby Chesney, the Charles I. Francis Professor in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and one of my co-convenors of the transatlantic workshop, kicked off the series with a post exploring the interesting question: “When does LOAC cease to apply?”

Bobby, introduced his post by saying:

“People sometimes speak of peacetime and wartime as sharply demarcated, their factual foundations and legal consequences being clearly distinct from one another. Everyone here will appreciate that it is not always or even often so simple, as Mary Dudziak has documented so richly in her recent book WAR TIME: AN IDEA, ITS HISTORY, ITS CONSEQUENCES. Circumstances of violence can occur across a broad spectrum of intensity, with the nature and intensity of events rising or falling in unexpected ways (and places) over time. Even the parties themselves can undergo sweeping changes. Small wonder, then, that we lawyers spend so much time wrestling with the details of IHL’s field of application.”

He then explained that:

“Usually we approach the field-of-application question from the front-end, which is to say we talk about whether a given situation of violence has crossed over into the realm of armed conflict, bringing IHL to bear (and thus also complicating the question of IHRL’s role). It is a particularly vexing issue in the context of potential NIACs”

However, less attention has been paid to the back-end of the armed conflicts, particularly to the question of when a NIAC is to be regarded as having ended. This is the focus of Bobby’s post. He considers various options for assessing when IHL should cease to apply, examining the approach set out in the ICTY Appeals Chamber’s famous Tadic case (that IHL applies until a “peaceful settlement is achievement”), as well as whether the test for determining whether a NIAC exists at the front end of the conflict should be applied for determining whether it has terminated.

You can read Bobby’s post in full over on Lawfare.

For a list of other scheduled posts in this series, see here