Anders Henriksen

Trustworthy Pervasive Healthcare Services via Multiparty Session Types

This paper proposes a new theory of multiparty session types extended with propositional assertions and symmetric sum types for modelling collaborative distributed workflows. Multiparty session types statically guarantee that workflows are type-safe and deadlock-free, facilitate automatic generation of participant-specific (“local”) workflow protocols from global descriptions, and support flexible implementation of local workflows guaranteed to be compliant with the workflow protocols. The extensions with assertions and symmetric sum types support expressing state-based (pre)conditions and consensual multiparty synchronisation, which are common in complex distributed workflows.

Lawful State Responses to Low-Level Cyber-Attacks

The article discusses the sources of international law that may justify a state to respond to harmful interferences in cyberspace that occur outside times of armed conflict and that are not sufficiently serious to merit a rersort to self-defence under the un Charter. The focus is primarily aimed at the more immediate measures a targeted state may adopt in order to bring on-going harmful cyber-activities to a halt. The article opens with a discussion of the application of the traditional principles of sovereignty to activities in cyberspace and subsequently analyses how the principles of countermeasures may be applied to various forms of harmful cyber-incidents that fall below the threshold for triggering a right to self-defence. The article also examines the extent to which a plea of necessity may be invoked in order to justify the use of immediate defensive measures against cyber-attacks that may have an effect on other states.

Drone warfare and morality in riskless war

In this article, we examine the more or less instinctive uneasiness felt towards the use of armed drones by many scholars, policy-makers and military personnel. How is it, we ask, that many people – including members of the armed forces – acknowledge that armed drones offer an expedient and legally defensible solution to pressing security challenges and yet feel uncomfortable about them? The articles main argument is that much of the criticism of drone warfare is associated with an underlying ethically conditioned discomfort with so-called “riskless warfare”. The very feature that makes drones so attractive to policy-makers and military commanders – their risk free deployment – is, paradoxically, also one of the primary causes why many feel fundamentally uncomfortable with them. To make this argument, we build on the works of Martin van Creveld and Paul W. Kahn. While van Creveld argues that war should first and foremost be perceived of as a social activity governed more by the soldiers conducting the war than by the rationalty of states, Kahn identifies a ‘paradox of riskless warfare’ because our pursuit of asymmetry undermines reciprocity and thereby also the moral justification for killing the opponents combatants.

The Crisis in Syria and Humanitarian Intervention

On 21 August 2013, the population of Gouta near Damascus, Syria, experienced a major attack with a chemical weapon—the nerve agent sarin. According to US sources, more than 1,400 Syrians, including a large number of civilians, were killed in the attack,1 and the international community was outraged. Within a few days of the attack a number of states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Denmark, stated that they were ready to launch a military operation against the Syrian regime that was suspected of perpetrating the attack. Th e strongest reaction came from the United States, which a year earlier had stated that the use of chemical weapons in the civil war in Syria was a ‘red line’ the transgression of which would have ‘enormous consequences’.2 Not all states agreed, however, that a military response was warranted, and the Russian government in particular made it clear that it was opposed to the use of force and would therefore use its veto to block any United Nations (UN) Security Council resolution authorising a military operation against Syria. At the end of September 2013 the prospect of an imminent military action was put on hold when the Security Council adopted a resolution requiring Syria to dispose of its chemical weapons stockpiles and co-operate fully with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).3 Th e threats of military action against Syria issued by the United States and its Western allies during the summer of 2013, and the Russian resistance thereto,