When one aims to describe the human rights legality of targeted killings, one has to examine the right to life. The right to life is a natural and unalienable right of men. From the point of view of its subjects, the right to life requires that no man shall be killed arbitrarily, thus it ensures the life of the individual. From the relevant international conventions a two-folded obligation seems to flow: On the one hand, states have to respect the right to life of individuals, and in certain situations– based…
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THE CONSEQUENCES OF POST WAR CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION: REVIEW
War Conflicts affect the lives of people not only due to the large scale loss of lives, but also due to the destruction that it causes on infrastructure and livelihoods. Thus, War conflicts create a long term impact on social, economic and political systems making it difficult for societies to revive back to normal on their own. The period after war conflict poses several challenges for the communities and governments to recover the economic and social systems, while maintaining stability and achieving sustainable peace. The recovery process necessitates post conflict…
Read MoreNEEDFUL VOTER FRAUD DEFINITION : VOTER FRAUD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIDENCE : PART II
Conceptual clarity is important in evaluating evidence of fraud. We begin with a discussion of what voter fraud is and what it is not. The first problem in defining voter fraud is that as a crime, it defies precise legal meaning. In fact, there is no single accepted legal definition of voter fraud. In fact, some states do not actually criminalize ‘voter fraud,’ although they all criminalize acts that are commonly lumped together under the term, such as illegal voting, providing false information to register to vote, and multiple voting.…
Read MoreMILITARY STRATEGY IN A MORE HUMANITARIAN AGE : AN OVERVIEW WITH THE INTERNATIONAL LAW
International law has come to play an expanded role in the use of force. This expanded role has elevated evolving humanitarian law concepts over the long-standing preference for sovereignty, and has contributed to the state losing its uncontested control over the direction of war. The “state therefore has an interest in reappropriating the control and direction of war.” As Hew Strachan notes, “that is the purpose of strategy.” Arguments about international law are part of diplomacy, and “diplomatic arguments are a means to an end. They are part of a…
Read MoreTHE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: UNIVERSAL AND REGIONAL INSTRUMENT
All general universal and regional human rights instruments guarantee the right to a fair hearing in judicial proceedings (criminal, civil, disciplinary and administrative matters) before an independent and impartial court or tribunal. A treaty is an international written agreement concluded between States and/or intergovernmental organisations and governed by international law. The name the parties give to a treaty is of no relevance here (Covenant, Convention, Treaty, Protocol, etc.); what matters is the content and the language of the treaty, as well as the parties’ intention to be bound by it.…
Read MoreNEEDFULNESS OF VOTER FRAUD DEFINITION: VOTER FRAUD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIDENCE : PART I
Conceptual clarity is important in evaluating evidence of fraud. We begin with a discussion of what voter fraud is and what it is not. The first problem in defining voter fraud is that as a crime, it defies precise legal meaning. In fact, some states do not criminalize ‘voter fraud.’ However, they all criminalize acts that are commonly lumped together under the term, such as illegal voting, providing false information to register to vote, and multiple voting. The legal incoherence contributes to popular misunderstandings. We need a basic definition of…
Read MoreGLOBAL “ONE HEALTH” LAW AND GLOBAL HEALTH LAW AS INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY LAW
If enterprises and foundations represent new actors and sources of global health law, and international adjudicatory bodies represent the future of how global health law is applied, then animals, both domesticated and wild, represent the expansion of global health law’s subjects. Human health, narrowly defined, prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century. In some ways, the comprehensive approaches to animal, human, and plant life should have been obvious and inevitable from the earliest days of World Health Organization (WHO). Its most ambitious, early eradication effort focused on malaria. This effort…
Read MoreDIGITAL SILK ROUTE: PROMOTING DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM METHODS AND PROJECTS
China is providing different governments, with little protection of human rights, with telecommunications technology, facial-recognition hardware and analytical tools to process data. These technologies are then combined, in order to create advanced surveillance systems that can be used for policing, such as identifying political and social threats. But it also serves repressive purposes and can therefore strengthen authoritarianism. China’s export of these systems started to increase in 2012, and since 2016 it has increased even more rapidly. Many of these technological systems are on the border between public security, control…
Read MoreWAR CRIMES INTERNATIONAL ARMED CONFLICT AND INTERNALLY DISPLACED PEOPLE
After the end of the Second World War, the allies entered into two agreements. These were the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis (London Agreement) and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg Charter). When the Nuremberg Trials started, the accused, all Nazi Party members who actively participated in the Nazi Regime’s activities in various capacities, were charged on four counts. These were:- a. Conspiracy to commit aggression. b. Commission of aggression. c. Crimes in the conduct of warfare. d. Crimes…
Read MorePROTECTED AREAS AND COMMUNITY LAND RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
Human actions to conserve the Earth’s biodiversity have a deep history, in which the main actors are Indigenous Peoples and local communities who have stewarded lands and resources across generations as part of their cultures and ways of life. This local conservation, which is inseparable from customary lands and resources, is distinct from the formal national and international conservation enterprise that took shape in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism, but has been greatly affected by it. Expropriation and exclusion Conservation protected areas began to be established in an era of…
Read MoreTHE POWAR OF PROXIES : WHY NON STATE SPONSORS USE LOCAL MILITARY SURROGATES
The use of proxies in warfare is typically understood as a state sponsor’s reliance on military surrogates that are outside the purview of the state’s conventional armed or security forces, and that offer services to their benefactors in exchange for tangible material support. A long-standing feature in the history of armed conflict , the reliance on surrogates has become particularly endemic in the post–World War II era, with important implications for international security. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing “global war on terror,” the use of…
Read MoreTHE KEY ROLE OF STAKEHOLDERS AND EXPERTS IN SPACE AND GOVERNANCE
Institutional design includes constitutional-level rules that specify the participants, how authority is distributed, and how rules can be made, or what Hart would call “secondary rules.” Central to polycentric governance is users’ self-organization or self-governance, i.e., that users organize themselves to address shared problems and interests. In self-governance, the users of the Common pool Resources (CPRs) (e.g., fishermen fishing from the same lake, farmers using the same water basin) themselves establish, modify, and possibly enforce the rules regulating the use and protection of a common resource. As Elinor Ostrom noted,…
Read MoreDIGITAL CYBER REVOLUTION: AUTHORITARIANISM, CYBER SOVEREIGNTY AND REASSERTION OF STATE CONTROL
International law has generally recognized that, “ sovereignty is perhaps the most fundamental [principle]. From [which] emerges, inter alia, notions of non-intervention; prescriptive, enforcement, and adjudicative jurisdiction; sovereign immunity; due diligence; and territorial integrity.” A sovereign state thus maintains the right “to conduct its affairs without outside interference. Between independent states , respect for territorial sovereignty is an essential foundation of international relations.” Extending this principal of independent sovereign control to the ephemeral territory of cyber space, Russia and China have actively advocated for cyber sovereignty—“the idea that states should…
Read MoreTHE AGE OF NEW WARS: THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS IN ARMED CONFLICTS
In history & current warring parties, political scientists counted a large number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide, almost all of them in developed countries &developing countries. Observers of these current ‘New wars’ or ‘complex political emergencies’ have noted that the main target of the war parties is the civilian population, and systematic atrocities, massacres and bombings are often applied as rational strategies within current warfare. Some believe in witnessing a qualitative change in the way wars are waged and organized violence is exerted; in other words, a transformation in…
Read MoreINTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: HISTORY ADVANTAGE DISADVANTAGE AND LEARNED LESSONS: PART II
The motives behind international collaboration on the International Space Station (ISS) highlight the advantages of cooperation. This was a political decision and a positive sign of USA interest in further human space exploration becoming a global undertaking. Each country deemed this field of science as worthy of pursuing as well as saw the potential for important technological development in industry. Cooperation on the ISS can be seen as a means of closing gaps between nations. This project serves USA foreign policy and enhances relations by working together on an enormous…
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