Dino Kritsiotis

The Kosovo Crisis and Nato's Application of Armed Force Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

In the fifth week of NATOs 78–day aerial intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), the FRY initiated proceedings in the International Court of Justice against ten of its member States which it accused of violating the principles of international law in relation to the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello . 1 NATOs action, known as Operation Allied Force, had commenced on the night of 24 March 1999 when cruise missiles were directed on Serbian targets located in the Kosovan capital of Pristina and in the Republics capital of Belgrade. 2 This robust application of armed force came on the eve of the 50th anniversary of NATO, an organisation which was established after the Second World War for the collective defence of its member States, and constituted the first offensive launched against another sovereign State in the organisations entire history.

The Tremors of Tadić

This Article considers the impact, or tremors, of paragraph 70 of the decision on interlocutory appeal on jurisdiction of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in Prosecutor v. Tadic, which was delivered in October 1995. It establishes, and seeks to make clear, that the commitment of the Appeals Chamber in paragraph 70 of that decision was to provide definitions for both of the concepts of international and non-international armed conflicts, even though some impressions might be that the Appeals Chamber tended to run together these different concepts in order to provide a singular and overarching definition of “armed conflict.” In separate and successive turns, the Article explores the specific components of each concept as identified by the Appeals Chamber—first, for international armed conflicts, and, then, for non-international armed conflicts—before testing them against particular facts from practice as well as hypothetical examples, but the Article also makes use of a comparative investigation as to what the Appeals Chamber said for each form of armed conflict when contrasted with each other. We examine the extent to which these components have threaded themselves through subsequent practice—specifically the relationship of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court with the concept of non-international armed conflict—so as to chart the full progress of the jurisprudence of the Appeals Chamber in the afterlife of Tadic: hence the designation of the “tremors” of Tadic.

The Legality of the 1993 US Missile Strike on Iraq and the Right of Self-Defence in International Law

In the early evening hours of Saturday, 26 June 1993, the United States launched a missile attack on Iraq. Twenty-three Tomahawk sea-to-ground missiles were fired from two US warships, the USS Chancellorsville and the USS Peterson, located in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea respectively. 1 Sixteen of those launched hit their desired military target, the Military Intelligence Headquarters, situated just outside the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. A further four missiles fell within the compound of the intelligence service complex. Conflicting reports put the death toll at between six and eight civilians, with 20 injured, when the remaining three missile warheads went astray. 2 The Venezuelan Embassy was also reported to have been damaged. 3

Public International Law and the Concept of Law Applied

HLA Hart famously reserved the final chapter of his The Concept of Law for public international law, although it is not there—in Chapter X of that work—that that matter is actually introduced; references to public international law (or, rather, quite simply, to ‘international law’) occur with some frequency throughout the volume, where it is first discussed as an instance of doubtful law and saddled up alongside something called ‘primitive law’. As if by way of convenient example, this allows Hart the necessary ground to ‘recognize both clear and standard cases and challengeable borderline cases’ of

International Humanitarian Law and the Disintegration of States

[This volume was produced to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights. Forty years have yielded an impressive forty annual volumes. When it was started in 1971, the Yearbook was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It has always understood its mandate as transcending the narrow borders of the discipline of either national or international human rights. From the outset, international humanitarian law and international criminal law were understood as coming within the proper framework of the Yearbook, as were on occasion articles on diverse freedoms that may seem out of bounds to a strict interpreter of the phrase “human rights”., This volume was produced to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights. Forty years have yielded an impressive forty annual volumes. When it was started in 1971, the Yearbook was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It has always understood its mandate as transcending the narrow borders of the discipline of either national or international human rights. From the outset, international humanitarian law and international criminal law were understood as coming within the proper framework of the Yearbook, as were on occasion articles on diverse freedoms that may seem out of bounds to a strict interpreter of the phrase “human rights”.]

The Legal Travails of Kind‐Hearted Gunmen

Books reviewed in this article: Sean D. Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention: The United Nations in anEvolving World Order