Tag: Just War

Was America’s assassination of Qassem Suleimani justified?

March 16, 2020

The American authorities dislike the word “assassination”, because it implies a flouting of international and humanitarian law. Indeed, some human-rights lawyers see the use of drones to kill people as almost always unlawful. Agnès Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has argued that “outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal….lethal force can only be used where strictly necessary to protect against an imminent threat.”

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/01/07/was-americas-assassination-of-qassem-suleimani-justified?cid1=cust%2Fdailypicks1%2Fn%2Fbl%2Fn%2F2020017n%2Fowned%2Fn%2Fn%2Fdailypicks1%2Fn%2Fn%2Fe%2F373711%2Fn

The Responsibility to Protect

December 1, 2019

REVISITING HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

The international community in the last decade repeatedly made a mess of handling the many demands that were made for “humanitarian intervention”: coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harm. There were no agreed rules for handling cases such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo at the start of the 1990s, and there remain none today. Disagreement continues about whether there is a right of intervention, how and when it should be exercised, and under whose authority.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2002-11-01/responsibility-protect