2. The use of nuclear weapons as a potential war crime

Despite clear legal rules and political commitments, no significant progress has been made in nuclear disarmament for two decades. Moreover, not even the use of these weapons has been banned to date. New ideas and strategies are therefore necessary. The author explores an alternative approach to arms control focusing on the human dimension rather than on States’ security: "humanization" of arms control! The book explores the preparatory work on arms control treaties and in particular the role of civil society. It analyzes the positive experiences of the movements against chemical weapons, anti-personnel mines, and cluster munitions, as well as the recent conclusion of the Arms Trade Treaty. The author examines the question of whether civil society will be able to replicate the success strategies that have been used, in particular, in the field of anti-personnel mines (Ottawa Convention) and cluster munitions (Oslo Convention) in the nuclear weapons field. Is there any reason why the most destructive weapons should not be outlawed by a legally binding instrument? The book also explains the effects of weapons, especially nuclear weapons, on human beings, the environment, and global development, thereby focusing on vulnerable groups, such as indigenous peoples, women, and children. It takes a broad approach to human rights, including economic, social, and cultural rights. The author concludes that the use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international humanitarian and human rights law and, moreover, constitutes international crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In his general conclusions, the author makes concrete proposals for the progress toward a world without nuclear weapons.

This volume features a selection of the best scholarship on international law as it is relevant to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The essays consider the nonproliferation legal regime as a normative system and offer a more discrete consideration of international law in each weapons of mass destruction technology area. The role, authority and track record of the UN Security Council in this area are also evaluated.

Hitherto 'less-lethal' weapons, in contrast to classical firearms and other highly destructive weapons, have literally slipped under the radar of public international law. This book is the first monograph addressing and analysing all international legal regimes applicable to less-lethal weapons, ranging from arms control treaties, international humanitarian, criminal and human rights law. In doing so the different scenarios in which less-lethal weapons come to use will be taken into account, such as law enforcement, armed conflict and law enforcement scenarios during armed conflict. The relationships between the different legal regimes will be elaborated thoroughly with a view to examining how international law responds to less-lethal weapons. The final chapter provides guidelines as well as recommendations on appropriate use and regulation of less-lethal weapons, where the different scenarios of application, such as in armed conflict and law enforcement, will be given due account.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

This fourth volume in the book series on Nuclear Non-Proliferation in International Law focuses on human perspectives regarding the development and use of nuclear energy; the need for regional solutions; and recent activities towards prohibiting and abolishing nuclear weapons. Jonathan L. Black-Branch is Dean of Law and Professor of International and Comparative Law; Bencher of the Law Society of Manitoba; JP and Barrister (England & Wales); Barrister & Solicitor (Manitoba); and, Chair of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on Nuclear Weapons, Non- Proliferation & Contemporary International Law. Dieter Fleck is Former Director International Agreements & Policy, Federal Ministry of Defence, Germany; Member of the Advisory Board of the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL); and Rapporteur of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on Nuclear Weapons, Non- Proliferation & Contemporary International Law.

The third edition of this work sets out a comprehensive and analytical manual of international humanitarian law, accompanied by case analysis and extensive explanatory commentary by a team of distinguished and internationally renowned experts.

Bringing together the law of armed conflict governing the use of weapons into a single volume, the fully updated Second Edition of Weapons and the Law of Armed Conflict interprets these rules and discusses the factors influencing future developments in weapons law. After relating the historical evolution of weapons law, the book discusses the important customary principles that are the foundation of the subject, and provides a condensed account of the law that exists on the use of weapons. The treaties and customary rules applying to particular categories of weapon are thereafter listed and explained article by article and rule by rule in a series of chapters. Having stated the law as it is, the book then explores the way in which this dynamic field of international law develops in the light of various influences. The legal review of weapons is discussed, both from the perspective of how such reviews should be undertaken and how such a system should be established. Having stated the law as it is, the book then investigates the way in which this dynamic field of international law develops in the light of various influences. In the final chapter, the prospects for future rule change are considered. This Second Edition includes a discussion of new treaty law on expanding bullets, the arms trade, and norms in relation to biological and chemical weapons. It also analyses the International Manuals on air and missile warfare law and on cyber warfare law, the challenges posed by 'lethal autonomous weapon systems', and developments in the field of information and telecommunications otherwise known as cyber activities.