This morning, Israel launched a major military operation against Iran targeting its nuclear programme, including facilities, individual scientists and military leadership. In this post, I will provide a quick, preliminary analysis of the legality of Israel’s use of force against Iran as a matter of the jus ad bellum. As I will explain, Israel’s use of force against Iran is, on the facts as we know them, almost certainly illegal. The only justification that Israel can provide for its use of force is self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter – using force to repel an armed attack, subject to the criteria of necessity and proportionality. The first point to clarify here is that the nature and stated goals of Israel’s use of force – damaging Iran’s nuclear programme and preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon that could be used against Israel – are explicitly about deflecting a future armed attack by Iran against Israel, i.e. an attack that is yet to occur. In other words, this is not a…
Targeted Killings
Page 1 of 14
Were the Israeli Pager and Walkie-Talkie Attacks on Hezbollah Indiscriminate?
There is much that we still don’t know about the attacks that Israel has conducted against Hezbollah in Lebanon by detonating hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies rigged with explosives. This type of attack is genuinely unprecedented – I can’t recall any sufficiently close analogue, but maybe others can. This novelty poses some difficulty in understanding how long-established rules…
Targeted Killings: New Allegations Against India and Ukraine
Yesterday, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, stood up in Parliament and formally accused the government of India of committing a targeted killing on Canadian territory. The victim, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was a prominent leader of a Sikh separatist movement in India, who was designated as a terrorist by the Indian government. He was assassinated…
Amicus Curiae Brief in Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia
The European Court of Human Rights recently joined two major interstate cases pending before it – the interstate case filed by Ukraine and the Netherlands against Russia that concerned the downing of the MH17 airliner and events in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, which it declared admissible in January, with the new interstate application filed by Ukraine…
The European Court’s Admissibility Decision in Ukraine and the Netherlands v Russia: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Part II
In the first part of this post I talked about the (many) good things about the European Court’s admissibility decision in Ukraine and the Netherlands v Russia. In particular, the conclusion that Russia controlled the separatist areas of Eastern Ukraine from 2014 up to the oral hearing in the case in 2022 and…
- Page 1 of 14
- Last