Posts tagged ‘humanitarian law’
More Atrocities in the Congo
Drifting from my previous posts on international family law, I will focus today on the recent Human Rights Watch report on the Lord’s Resistance Army atrocities in the Congo. I have chosen to highlight this report for two reaons. First and foremost, I believe that the direct and indirect victims of the situation in the Congo deserve—at the very least—the world’s attention. Secondarily, I believe the report points out the nuanced and interdependent relationship between human rights and humanitarian law.
The 73-page report is heartbreaking. It contains information from 128 interviewees interviewed by three Human Rights Watch staffers. The accounts of murder, violence against children through child soldiers, rape, torture, abduction, and unimaginable brutality are not easy to read. I did, however, feel a duty to pay attention to these accounts.
Astonishingly (at least to this Western writer), the 312 murders and 250 abductions went relatively unnoticed for months. The area’s remoteness slowed communication, assistance, and investigation. This persistent isolation surely devastates the local population, who were unimaginably terrorized by these atrocities. Thanks to the courageous interviewees and interviewers, the world can take notice and seek some measure of justice.
The Human Rights Watch report calls for justice by addressing several stakeholders. It first demands that the LRA cease its attacks and release its prisoners.
The report then addresses the governments of the Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic,…
Sliding Through the Cracks: U.S. Private Military Contractors and International Humanitarian Law
“Some of the newest armed non-state parties operating in unstable states and conflict situations come from an unusual source: the private sector.”[1]
Expansion of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has made private military and security contractors (PMSCs) virtually indispensable. In her book One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, Allison Stanger reveals that last year, PMSCs accounted for 48 percent of the U.S. Defense Department’s workforce in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan.[2] “Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap,” she argues, “we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions.”[3] Hired help it seems, is the only way for a thinly stretched U.S. military to sustain current operations.
“On a superficial level, the shift means that most of those representing the United States … will be wearing the scruffy cargo pants, polo shirts, baseball caps and other casual accoutrements favored by overseas contractors rather than the fatigues and flight suits of the military.”[4] A closer look reveals that today’s private contractors do everything from providing security services at U.S. embassies[5] to performing “enhanced interrogations” – a.k.a. torture[6] – at Abu Ghraib and loading bombs onto remotely piloted Predator drones that lethally target members of Al Qaeda.[7]
This growing involvement in core…
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”.
