Posts tagged ‘geneva conventions’
The duty to recognize Palestine
Last week, culminating two years of intensive state-building efforts, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Mahmoud Abbas formally applied to the United Nations for the admission of the state of Palestine as its newest member. While the outcome and consequences of this controversial bid are yet to be seen, I wish here to consider its legal implications and particularly the third-party obligations to which it gives rise.
The international community has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to Palestinian self-determination. In general terms, its normative obligations to the Palestinian people can be divided into three categories. First, there is a moral duty, arising both from humanitarian interest and from the international community’s exceptionally pronounced role in the protracted conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, to advance peace and reconciliation between the two parties. Second, there is a general legal duty, stemming from the preambles of the UN Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to promote respect for the Palestinians’ human rights, which have been recognized as including the collective right to self-determination.[1] Third, there is a specific legal duty, rooted in the Geneva Conventions, to protect the rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation by ensuring Israeli compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL).
Effects of UN recognition on the parties’ compliance with international law
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, often built on stolen private land,[2] have…
Is it ever legal to kidnap your enemies?
Palestinian engineer Dirar Abu Sisi was indicted in Israel last week on nine terrorism-related charges, after over a month in prison. Because of the gag order that has been imposed on his case, many of the details remain unknown, but speculation abounds. Did Abu Sisi develop advanced weapons for Hamas to use against Israel? Is he even a member of Hamas? Does he know the whereabouts of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit?
The controversy surrounding the case stems largely from the circumstances leading to Abu Sisi’s detention: according to credible reports, he was abducted by Israeli agents from a train while visiting his wife in Ukraine. The similarity in the fates of their loved ones, both abducted and detained (or, in the words of some, kidnapped) by enemy forces in the course of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities was surely not lost on Shalit’s father or Abu Sisi’s wife, who spoke by phone earlier this week.
Disregarding for the moment the apparent Israeli violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and the corresponding breach of art. 2 of the United Nations Charter, which will surely have diplomatic repercussions for Israel if the reports are shown to be true (Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov said on a recent visit to Israel that he “doesn’t want to imagine” that possibility), I wish to consider here the legality of abduction missions within the framework…
Self-determination and the “right” to resist occupation
The fundamental, collective human right to self-determination is arguably the cornerstone of the entire international legal order.
Self-determination is understood as the right of all national groups (in practice, groups recognized as such by themselves and by others) to be governed and represented (popularly or otherwise) by a sovereign state (or federation) functioning as the highest source of domestic legal authority. Affirmation of the right to self-determination is prominently featured in art. 1(1) of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It is deemed to be an inherent right; that is, it does not derive from the international legal order but rather is presupposed by the latter: art. 1(2) of the United Nations Charter recognizes the principle of self-determination as a basis for the existence of the UN.
It is often assumed that the right to self-determination gives peoples living under foreign military occupation an absolute right to resist against the occupying power. It is interesting to note, therefore, that nowhere in international humanitarian law (IHL) – the primary body of law dealing with military occupation – can such a right be found or even inferred. Moreover, certain IHL provisions actually seem to preclude a general right to resist occupation. For example, IHL gives an occupying power not only the right, but the obligation to ensure…
A Trend Toward the ‘Humanization’ of Conflict Law?
Israeli Targeted Killing and the relationship between international humanitarian law and human rights
The modern laws of warfare were born in the nineteenth century from Europe’s fears “about the escalating severity of war”[1]. As the decades passed, war’s means, methods, aims and tactics have changed. Suicide bombers that melt into the civilian population have replaced ordered battalions of uniformed soldiers. Strikes from unmanned Predator drones have supplanted direct confrontations on the battlefield. Wars are fought not only against states, but also against colonial domination, racist regimes and abstract social phenomena, most notably the “war on terror”.
