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On 4 August 2022, Amnesty International published its report 'Ukraine: Ukrainian Fighting Tactics Endanger Civilians', in which it accused Ukraine of violating international humanitarian law 'by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals' and in this way putting civilians at risk. According to the report, '[s]uch tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians, as they turn civilian objects into military targets. The ensuing Russian strikes in populated areas have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure'. The report sparked some controversies. The question that the author attempts to answer in this article is whether there are any factual or legal arguments supporting the conclusions of the report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) started to transform into a matter of international security. Today, this is reflected in the Women, Peace and Security framework, which has left an impression also on UN peacekeeping mandates and operations, as well as on global protection imperatives. Simultaneously, academic attention to CRSV has skyrocketed in the past two decades. This article reviews what this growing body of research tells us about how peacekeeping authorities handle CRSV. In brief, scholars have identified encouraging trends in peacekeeping responsiveness to this violence, and prior research on its effectiveness in protecting civilians also gives cause for cautious optimism. Nonetheless, notable gaps in our knowledge remain, in particular when it comes to more local, fine-grained data and analysis. By way of conclusion, the article therefore outlines where the authors see the most promising avenues for future research on CRSV and peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police brutality is a highly charged topic which has been prevalent both locally and internationally. Scholars contend that theory-based research has recently emerged to precisely explain this police behaviour. There are theorists from several schools of thought who seek to attribute causality for police violence. In this article, three of the more popular existing theories will be examined: social conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and the control balance theory. To this end, the article has three objectives. Firstly, it scrutinises the relevant theories dealing with the issue of police brutality. Secondly, it discusses the relevant domestic and international instruments that seek to address the problem of police brutality. Lastly, this article makes recommendations regarding how the system of policing in South Africa can be revamped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helen Frowe's Defensive Killing is in many respects an excellent book, full of arguments that are original, interesting, important, and often persuasive. In other respects, the book is deeply unsettling, as it forcefully challenges the belief that killing ordinary civilians in armed conflict is a paradigmatic moral wrong. In particular, Frowe argues that civilians who make political, material, strategic, or financial contributions to an unjust war may lose their moral protection from intentional and collateral harm. On this point, Frowe's arguments are original, interesting, and important but, thankfully, not persuasive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levée en masse - the spontaneous uprising of the civilian population against an invading force - has long been a part of the modern law of armed conflict with regard to determining who may legitimately participate in armed conflict. The concept originated during the revolutionary wars in America and France, and was incorporated into the first codified rules of armed conflict. However, despite the prevalence of the category of levée en masse in the modern laws of armed conflict, there have been few, if any, instances of levée en masse taking place in modern armed conflicts. This article examines how and why the category of levée en masse developed. In doing so, this article situates the concept and evolution of levée en masse within the history of international humanitarian law more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the thousands of lethal drone strikes conducted since 2001 violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and in particular, the right to life. The analysis provided is also applicable to the right to life enshrined in customary international law and regional human rights treaties. While most legal and academic commentary on deaths caused by drones has focused on an international humanitarian law (IHL) framework—perhaps because the primary weaponised drone user, the United States, insists that this is the appropriate legal context—this article argues that a human rights framework for assessing lethal drone strikes is preferable, useful, and necessary. Not only is it likely that the so-called war on terror is a semantic rather than a legal war, the ICCPR continues to apply during conflict. Moreover, opacity surrounds most lethal drone strikes, which the Trump administration appears likely to increase, while simultaneously reducing Obama-era safeguards. In that context, a human rights assessment, which will be inherently more stringent towards fatalities than an IHL framework, is urgently needed. The article concludes that the right to life attaches to everyone regardless of the territory in which they are targeted; that effective jurisdiction and control is satisfied upon ability to lethally target an individual; that relevant ICCPR rights apply in ungoverned territories as well; and that the threat of terrorism does not displace these rights or the applicability of the ICCPR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazilian Federal Military Justice has received criticism, especially with regard to the jurisdiction to try civilians in peacetime. However, this judgment protects the interests of the military and rests on the most current positivity. There is no incompatibility between the Constitution and the rule established by Article 9 of the Military Criminal Code. The competence therein derives from the legislature's intention that used the original ratione legis and also the ratione personae criteria to fix it. On the other hand, the doctrine and the Supreme Court understand that the protection of the interests of the Armed Forces are not restricted to the hierarchy and discipline, recognizing the competence of military courts to try civilians, also in the light of its peculiarity. It is important to emphasize the Brazilian Federal Military Justice is neither a martial court nor an administrative tribunal, but a branch of the Judiciary Power. Its guiding principles are in line with the human rights enshrined in the Brazilian legal system and the American Convention on Human Rights. Under the auspices of the adversarial system, the trial of civilians by federal military court does not violate the guarantee of due process, since every process started respects the superior constitutional principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article is the transcript of the Peace Lecture held by Prof. Zegveld as part of the Peace Week 2013. It criticises the fact that Western countries do not provide data on the numbers of civilian casualties their wars cause. It remains controversial whether this is the consequence of a choice ‘not to do body counts’, or whether the governments does not want these figures to be revealed. In any case, the absence of this data leads to a de facto denial of the existence of these victims. This is reflected by the difficulties encountered when accountability and compensation are sought. It is argued here that there is a legal obligation to register victim casualties, as well as a necessity to do so from democratic, military and moral perspectives. For, as a component of conflict in itself, we can only truly evaluate our wars when the victim casualties are known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For self-defence actions to be lawful, they must be directed at military targets. The absolute prohibition on non-military targeting under the jus in bello is well known, but the jus ad bellum also limits the target selection of states conducting defensive operations. Restrictions on targeting form a key aspect of the customary international law criteria of necessity and proportionality. In most situations, the jus in bello will be the starting point for the definition of a military targeting rule. Yet it has been argued that there may be circumstances when the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello do not temporally or substantively overlap in situations of self-defence. In order to address any possible gaps in civilian protection, and to bring conceptual clarity to one particular dimension of the relationship between the two regimes, this article explores the independent sources of a military targeting rule. The aim is not to displace the jus in bello as the ‘lead’ regime on how targeting decisions must be made, or to undermine the traditional separation between the two ‘war law’ regimes. Rather, conceptual light is shed on a sometimes assumed but generally neglected dimension of the jus ad bellum’s necessity and proportionality criteria that may, in limited circumstances, have significance for our understanding of human protection during war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that groups of fighters who "belong" to a party to an international armed conflict without fulfilling the requirements of Article 4(A)(2) of Geneva Convention III should be classified as combatants, rather than as civilians. This article questions the reasoning put forward in support of that view, by showing that the arguments may be partly circular, incomplete, and debatable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The responsibility to protect was not the only concept that grew out of the world's failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so, than had hitherto been common. Oxfam's role in the campaign to persuade the 2005 World Summit to adopt the responsibility to protect was one prominent example, but, to different degrees, this broad approach has become widely shared among many international humanitarian agencies. Since 2005, however, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility to protect to frame its own work to help protect civilians, or to advocate to prevent mass atrocities in specific crises. This is partly because of the fear that R2P can be misapplied to justify military intervention where the benefits do not clearly outweigh the risks. But it is also because of the continuing suspicion around R2P among many governments. This seems to reflect the wider limits of what largely Western-based humanitarian agencies and governments can do to develop new international norms and put them into effect. When R2P was first developed, humanitarian agencies played a part in broadly similar alliances to ban landmines, establish the ICC and so on. Some of these have already had a substantial effect, while it may be a generation before the value of R2P and others can be fairly evaluated. Looking ahead, humanitarian agencies wiil have to put an increasing emphasis on influencing emerging powers and other Southern governments, while alliances between governments and NGOS, to be effective, will have to be genuinely global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will consider prosecution of civilians protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention for war crimes, focusing on applicable legislation and competent courts. It will first focus on occupying forces looking at both the issue of applicable legislation and competent courts then shift its focus to invading forces. The paper will conclude by briefly recapping its findings and commenting on whether the same strike a proper balance between ensuring prosecution of war criminals and protection of protected civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Security Council's disparate responses to relatively similar acts of regime violence in Syria and Libya, it seems that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine is heavily influenced by factors other than the substantive act of violence. Accordingly, this paper discusses the legal, but also the strategic and pragmatic factors influencing the use, or abstention from the use, of armed humanitarian intervention. While some critics decry the influence of factors that are seemingly exogenous to Responsibility to Protect, this paper argues that the interplay of law and various matters of strategic concern such as politics, economics, and pragmatics is an unavoidable reality in a world where political actors (the states on the Security Council) decide the legitimacy of interventions. Therefore, this paper contends that the strategic and pragmatic concerns that prevent the use of force in Syria do not make the doctrine ipso facto illegitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common sense suggests that if a war is unjust, then there is a strong moral reason not to contribute to it. I argue that this presumption is mistaken. It can be permissible to contribute to an unjust war because, in general, whether it is permissible to perform an act often depends on the alternatives available to the actor. The relevant alternatives available to a government waging a war differ systematically from the relevant alternatives available to individuals in a position to contribute to the war. Hence the conditions determining whether it is permissible for a government to wage a war often differ from the conditions determining whether it is permissible for others to promote that war. This difference is manifest most often in unjust wars with putatively humanitarian aims-an increasingly common type of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how Vietnamese combatants of the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam may have experienced battle during the Indochina War's most intensive phase beginning in 1950 and culminating in the Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It seeks to provide what is almost always missing in military histories of Dien Bien Phu-the unprecedented assault on the Vietnamese body. It uses the Vietnamese experience to think about what might be some of the similarities and differences between the Western experience of war and those occurring in the non-Western world, especially at this deadly southern intersection between decolonization and the Cold War. Vietnamese bodies were particularly vulnerable to the technological destruction of modern war as decolonization and the Cold War combined in an explosive and uneven mix from 1950. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]