Principle of distinction, one of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law dictates, that participants in hostilities at all times distinguish between civilian objects and military ...objectives, as well as between civilians and combatants. This article addresses the adequacy of the protection offered by the principle in the cyber domain. Great reliance of militaries on civilian cyberinfrastructure expands the range of military objectives to the systems which key civilian activities depend on. There are many unknowns in fulfilling even the simple conditions for the combatant status, as well as in regulation of civilian direct participation in hostilities.
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been widely recognized as one of the most significant threats to peace and security in Europe since World War II. The large-scale proliferation of unmanned ...aerial vehicles in this conflict reveals how drones and autonomous weapons systems are transforming warfare. At the same time, they are raising concerns about the way conflicts are being fought, and how international peace and security is being secured through international humanitarian law. This article therefore provides a deep empirical analysis of the types of drones being deployed in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and their specific contributions to the conflict. The study provides several charts that indicate the make of the drones being used, their type, and the function of each drone employed by both parties to the conflict. The charts highlight various parameters such as maximum speed, endurance, and altitude capabilities. The empirical part of the article then feeds into the second part of the article which delves into the question of whether the drones being used there meet the requirements of the principles of distinction and proportionality as mandated in international humanitarian law. It argues that there seems to be evidence of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, and investigations need to be carried out to determine whether there should be accountability. The article argues that the artificial intelligence being used in drones make them distinct from ordinary weapons as it is their autonomy to make decisions which ensures that accountability for IHL violations is problematic. The article argues that IHL ought to be reformed to deal with these new warfare capabilities.
International humanitarian law is a branch of public international law that seeks to moderate the conduct of wars to protect those who are not taking part in the hostilities. Under international ...humanitarian law, belligerents may not intentionally target civilians or installations that are indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. While collateral harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure may occur, international humanitarian law prohibits attacks that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. In practice, these principles have not always been honored or enforced. State and non-state actors have deliberately targeted civilians and/or disregarded civilian impacts, often for the purpose of pressuring political leaders to capitulate. The increasing occurrence and severity of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure in modern conflicts calls into question the continuing relevance of what were once viewed as fundamental protections. In this paper, we present a case study involving Russia’s 2022–23 attacks on Ukraine’s electric power infrastructure, which left millions of civilians without heat, water, or other basic services for extended periods in harsh winter conditions. Considering the scope, scale, and long-term impacts of these attacks, we conclude that Russia violated international law. We also suggest that a new international protocol may be necessary in order to more effectively deter and punish attacks on civilian infrastructure in future armed conflicts and military occupations.
•“What the Ukrainian energy system has been experiencing since October 2022, no energy system in the world has ever experienced.”•“Russia came frighteningly close to taking down the entire power grid in Europe’s second-largest nation.”•“Russia’s effort to disrupt power delivery systems throughout Ukraine violated international laws”•“We propose the adoption of a new international code of conduct to better protect civilian access to electric power.”
This article explores the role of metadata analytics in the target selection process to show how such analytics undermines the fundamental principle of international humanitarian law, that is, the ...principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. The central part of the article is divided into three sections. The first section provides a brief overview of how international humanitarian law draws the line between civilians and legitimate military targets (e.g. members of armed forces, paramilitary groups, organized armed groups, and civilians directly participating in hostilities) in both international and non-international armed conflicts. The second section explores the use of metadata analytics in the target selection process by focusing on two programs, the Real Time - Real Gateway (RT-RG) and SKYNET, developed by the United States to detect deviant 'terrorist' behaviour. The third section provides new insights into how metadata analytics creates the circumstances for violations of the principle of distinction. This section focuses on four characteristics of metadata analysis that undermine the principle of distinction (e.g. the inability to make qualitative distinctions between potential targets, the uncertainty of results, the incorporated margin of error, and the unpredictability of target determinations).
There is a growing interest in developing artificial intelligence (AI) weapon guidance systems in the military domain. Current guidance systems employ various methods to guide a weapon to its target. ...This target accuracy is a critical factor for its effectiveness. Artificial intelligence capabilities could enable these systems to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence, such as identifying potential threats or targets on the battlefield while continually improving the system’s performance at its assigned task.
The forgotten story of the birth and life of the definition of 'military objectives' is relevant to the ongoing discussion about the need to adapt the law to asymmetric warfare. This definition, ...authored by a West German law professor and former member of the Nazi party, was driven by a Western effort to privilege regular armies while curbing the actions of guerrilla fighters and exposing their civilian supporters to harm. The Non-Aligned Movement turned the tide by burdening regular armies while exempting irregular combatants from the consequences of disregarding the law. It was only through judicial intervention- grounded in an imagined history of the linear progress of humanity- that civilians on both sides of asymmetric conflicts would ultimately become entitled to receive adequate protection.
In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal ...category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media. Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects.
Are armed drones a permissible and harmless military technology from the point of view of international humanitarian law? With this question, the author puts the much-discussed armed drones to the ...test of Article 36 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which imposes on states an obligation to test new weapons and means of warfare. Furthermore, the work deals with three controversial political theses around the effects of drone technology on modern warfare and explains what relevance these have from the perspective of international humanitarian law. The present work thus gives a complete view of the question of the admissibility of armed drones raised above.
Handelt es sich bei bewaffneten Drohnen um eine aus Sicht des humanitären Völkerrechts zulässige und unbedenkliche Militärtechnologie? Mit dieser Frage stellt die Autorin die viel diskutierten bewaffneten Drohnen auf den Prüfstand des Art. 36 des Ersten Zusatzprotokolls der Genfer Konventionen, welcher den Staaten eine Prüfpflicht neuer Waffen und Mittel der Kriegführung auferlegt. Im Weiteren befasst sich das Werk mit drei kontroversen politischen Thesen rund um die Auswirkungen der Drohnentechnologie auf die moderne Kriegführung und legt dar, welche Relevanz diese aus der Sicht des humanitären Völkerrechts haben. Das vorliegende Werk gibt somit eine vollständige Sicht auf die oben aufgeworfene Frage der Zulässigkeit bewaffneter Drohnen.
Military artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technology might still be in the relatively fledgling stages but the debate on how to regulate its use is already in full swing. Much of the discussion ...revolves around autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and the ‘responsibility gap’ they would ostensibly produce. This contribution argues that while some military AI technologies may indeed cause a range of conceptual hurdles in the realm of individual responsibility, they do not raise any unique issues under the law of state responsibility. The following analysis considers the latter regime and maps out crucial junctions in applying it to potential violations of the cornerstone of international humanitarian law (IHL) – the principle of distinction – resulting from the use of AI-enabled military technologies. It reveals that any challenges in ascribing responsibility in cases involving AWS would not be caused by the incorporation of AI, but stem from pre-existing systemic shortcomings of IHL and the unclear reverberations of mistakes thereunder. The article reiterates that state responsibility for the effects of AWS deployment is always retained through the commander's ultimate responsibility to authorise weapon deployment in accordance with IHL. It is proposed, however, that should the so-called fully autonomous weapon systems – that is, machine learning-based lethal systems that are capable of changing their own rules of operation beyond a predetermined framework – ever be fielded, it might be fairer to attribute their conduct to the fielding state, by conceptualising them as state agents, and treat them akin to state organs.
Abstract
The civilian-combatant frame persists as the main legal lens through which lawyers organize the relationships of conflict zone actors. As a result, little attention has been paid in ...international legal scholarship to different gradations of ‘civilianness’ and the ways in which some civilians might compete to distinguish themselves from each other. Drawing attention to international humanitarian actors – particularly those working for NGOs – this article explores the micro-strategies these actors engage in to negotiate their relative status in war. Original qualitative empirical findings from South Sudan illuminate the way in which humanitarians struggle over distinction with individuals working for the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS. As is shown, humanitarian actors are doing away with a static civilian-combatant binary in their daily practice. A more fluid logic informs both their self-conceptualization and their interactions with others who share the operational space. Humanitarian actors envision civilianness as a contingent concept, and they operate according to a continuum along which everything is a matter of degree and subtle gradation. As civilianness is detached from the civilian, any given actor might acquire or shed civilian-like, or combatant-like, characteristics at any moment. The distinction practices that humanitarian actors enact can be understood as a bid for legibility, so that they might be rendered intelligible in international law and in the eyes of other actors as a special kind of civilian – the ‘civilian plus’.
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