This book discusses the manner in which Britain’s wars, which took place between 2000 and 2015, have interacted with the relevant principles of international law and English law for the purpose, primarily, of considering legal accountability. During a debate in the House of Lords in 2005 a former Chief of the Defence Staff commented that ‘the Armed Forces are under legal siege.’ The book will discuss the major legal issues which have arisen, ranging from the various votes in Parliament to go to war, the constitutional relationship between ministers and senior commanders, the right under international law to use force, the influence of human rights law, the role of the courts in England (including the coroners’ courts), to the legal regime applying to the conduct of UK military operations. It will assess critically whether the armed forces will now have to accept that operations conducted outside the UK are subject to greater legal scrutiny than previously and whether, if this is the case, it is likely to hinder their future military activities. This book will be of great interest to scholars of international law, the law of armed conflict, military studies and international relations, as well as to those with a professional or other interest in the subject matter.

This book examines the UK approach to investigating international crimes and serious human rights violations. In 2010, the United Nations Secretary General referred to the emerging system of international justice, including the creation of the International Criminal Court, as the ‘Age of Accountability.’ However, the UK has sometimes struggled to comply with its international law obligations. Using examples from the post-World War II period to 2018, interviews with leading UK military lawyers and newly disclosed official documents, this work explains the legal duties, how the UK military and civilian justice systems investigate alleged military misconduct and highlights the challenges involved. It provides suggestions on strengthening domestic law and policy and its importance for the UK’s legitimacy as an exporter of rule of law expertise. This text is essential reading for practitioners, academics, government officials and students of international, criminal, humanitarian or human rights law.

This Oxford Handbook ambitiously seeks to lay the groundwork for the relatively new field of comparative foreign relations law. Comparative foreign relations law compares and contrasts how nations, and also supranational entities (for example, the European Union), structure their decisions about matters such as entering into and exiting from international agreements, engaging with international institutions, and using military force, as well as how they incorporate treaties and customary international law into their domestic legal systems. The legal materials that make up a nation's foreign relations law can include constitutional law, statutory law, administrative law, and judicial precedent, among other areas. This book consists of 46 chapters, written by leading authors from around the world. Some of the chapters are empirically focused, others are theoretical, and still others contain in-depth case studies. In addition to being an invaluable resource for scholars working in this area, the book should be of interest to a wide range of lawyers, judges, and law students. Foreign relations law issues are addressed regularly by lawyers working in foreign ministries, and globalization has meant that domestic judges, too, are increasingly confronted by them. In addition, private lawyers who work on matters that extend beyond their home countries often are required to navigate issues of foreign relations law. An increasing number of law school courses in comparative foreign relations law are also now being developed, making this volume an important resource for students as well. Comparative foreign relations law is a newly emerging field of study and teaching, and this volume is likely to become a key reference work as the field continues to develop.

The United States Department of Defense Law of War Manual: Commentary and Critique provides an irreplaceable resource for any politician, international expert, or military practitioner who wishes to understand the approach taken by the American military in the complex range of modern conflicts. Readers will understand the strengths and weaknesses of US legal and policy pronouncements and the reasons behind the modern American way of war, whether US forces deploy alone or in coalitions. This book provides unprecedented and precise analysis of the US approach to the most pressing problems in modern wars, including controversies surrounding use of human shields, fighting in urban areas, the use of cyberwar and modern weaponry, expanding understanding of human rights, and the rise of ISIS. This group of authors, including academics and military practitioners, provides a wealth of expertise that demystifies overlapping threads of law and policy amidst the world's seemingly intractable conflicts.

The legal position of visiting forces transcends domestic and international law and is of growing importance in our increasingly globalized and insecure world. 'In area' and 'out of area' operations, both for the purpose of establishing and maintaining peace and in connection with the conduct of other military operations and training, are likely to become more frequent for a variety of reasons. Finding where the applicable law places the balance between the interests, sensitivities and needs of the host state and the requirements, often practical in nature, of the visiting force is a key objective in ensuring that the relationship between hosts and 'guests' is and remains harmonious. All of this must be achieved in an increasingly complex legal environment. This fully updated second edition of The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces addresses the issues surrounding visiting forces and provides a full overview of the legal framework in which they operate. Through an analysis of jurisprudence and historical developments, it offers a comparative commentary to the UN, NATO, and other SOFA rules. The Handbook then continues its analysis through cases studies of visiting forces in key countries, including a fully updated chapter on Afghanistan that considers the various stages of the conflict , before offering conclusions on the current state of the law and its likely future development.

This book provides an accessible and engaging account of the contemporary laws of war. It highlights how, even though war has been outlawed and should be finished as an institution, states continue to claim that they can wage necessary wars of self-defence, engage in lawful killings in war, and imprison law-of-war detainees.

In Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, Brian Drohan demonstrates that British officials’ choices concerning counterinsurgency methods have long been deeply influenced or even redirected by the work of human rights activists. To reveal how that influence was manifested by military policies and practices, Drohan examines three British counterinsurgency campaigns—Cyprus (1955–1959), Aden (1963–1967), and the peak of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland (1969–1976). This book is enriched by Drohan’s use of a newly available collection of 1.2 million colonial-era files, International Committee of the Red Cross files, the extensive Troubles collection at Linen Hall Library in Belfast, and many other sources. Drohan argues that when faced with human rights activism, British officials sought to evade, discredit, and deflect public criticism of their actions to avoid drawing attention to brutal counterinsurgency practices such as the use of torture during interrogation. Some of the topics discussed in the book, such as the use of violence against civilians, the desire to uphold human rights values while simultaneously employing brutal methods, and the dynamic of wars waged in the glare of the media, are of critical interest to scholars, lawyers, and government officials dealing with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those to come in the future.

To what extent do a state's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights apply beyond its territorial borders? Are soldiers deployed on overseas operations bound by the human rights commitments of their home state? What about other agents, like the police or diplomatic and consular services? If a state's obligations do apply abroad, are they to be upheld in full or should they be tailored to the situation at hand? Few topics have posed more of a challenge for the European Court of Human Rights than this issue of the Convention's extraterritorial application. This book provides a novel understanding on why this is by looking at the behaviour of those principally tasked with interpreting the treaty: the Strasbourg Court, state parties, and national courts. It offers a theory for how these communities operate: what motivates, constrains and ultimately shapes their interpretive practices. Through a detailed analysis of the jurisprudence, with a particular focus on British authorities and judges during and after the Iraq War (2003), the book provides an explanation of how the interpretation of extraterritorial obligations has developed over time and how these obligations are currently understood. Some have argued that it is imperialistic to apply the Convention extraterritorially. If this is the case, the focus of this book is on those 'imperialists' who have interpreted European human rights law to extend beyond a state's borders, as it is with them that any lasting solution to the challenge will be found.

This book addresses the various ways in which modern approaches to the protection of national security have impacted upon the constitutional order of the United Kingdom. It outlines and assesses the constitutional significance of the three primary elements of the United Kingdom's response to the possibility of terrorism and other phenomena that threaten the security of the state: the body of counter-terrorism legislation that has grown up in the last decade and a half; the evolving law of investigatory powers; and, to the extent relevant to the domestic constitution, the law and practice governing international military action and co-operation. Following on from this, the author demonstrates that considerations of national security – as a good to be protected and promoted in contemporary Britain – are reflected not merely in the existence of discrete bodies of law by which it is protected at home and abroad, but simultaneously and increasingly leaked into other areas of public law. Elements of the constitution which are not directly and inherently linked to national security nevertheless become (by both accident and design) implicated in the state's national security endeavours, with significant and at times far-reaching consequences for the constitutional order generally. A renewed and strengthened concern for national security since September 2001 has, it is argued, dragged into its orbit a variety of constitutional phenomena and altered them in its image, giving rise to what we might call a national security constitution.

While military law is often narrowly understood and studied as the specific and specialist laws, processes and institutions governing service personnel, this accessible book takes a broader approach, examining military justice from a wider consideration of the rights and duties of government and soldiers engaged in military operations.