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International Law

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University of Michigan Law School

Michigan Journal of International Law

Humanitarian law

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Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

All Other Breaches: State Practice And The Geneva Conventions’ Nebulous Class Of Less Discussed Prohibitions, Jesse Medlong Jan 2013

All Other Breaches: State Practice And The Geneva Conventions’ Nebulous Class Of Less Discussed Prohibitions, Jesse Medlong

Michigan Journal of International Law

With respect to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions, a great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years over the two-tiered system of tribunals employed by the United States in its prosecution of enemy combatants in the “war on terror.” Less discussed, though, is the wholly separate two-tiered system for sorting violators of the Geneva Conventions that emerges from the very text of those agreements. This stratification is a function of the Conventions’ distinction between those who commit “grave breaches” and those who merely commit “acts contrary to the provisions of the present convention” or “all other …


Targeting And The Concept Of Intent, Jens David Ohlin Jan 2013

Targeting And The Concept Of Intent, Jens David Ohlin

Michigan Journal of International Law

International law generally prohibits military forces from intentionally targeting civilians; this is the principle of distinction. In contrast, unintended collateral damage is permissible unless the anticipated civilian deaths outweigh the expected military advantage of the strike; this is the principle of proportionality. These cardinal targeting rules of international humanitarian law are generally assumed by military lawyers to be relatively well-settled. However, recent international tribunals applying this law in a string of little-noticed decisions have completely upended this understanding. Armed with criminal law principles from their own domestic systems — often civil law jurisdictions — prosecutors, judges and even scholars have …


An Emerging Norm - Determining The Meaning And Legal Status Of The Responsibility To Protect, Jonah Eaton Jan 2011

An Emerging Norm - Determining The Meaning And Legal Status Of The Responsibility To Protect, Jonah Eaton

Michigan Journal of International Law

The responsibility to protect, from its recent nativity in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), is the latest round in an old debate pitting the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states against allowing such intervention to prevent gross and systematic violations of human rights. Advocates for the concept see it as an important new commitment by the international community, injecting new meaning into the tragically threadbare promise to never again allow mass atrocities to occur unchallenged. ICISS offered the concept of responsibility to protect as a new way to confront …