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24650 results in Public International Law

Page 423 of 1233

  • 7 - Son My: War Crimes and Individual Responsibility

  • from PART II - WAR AND WAR CRIMES
  • Edited by Stefan Andersson, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    Revisiting the Vietnam War and International Law
    Published online:
    28 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 December 2017, pp 207-225

  • Summary

    No voice has been more passionate and persuasive in its call for a renewal of the laws of war than that of Josef Kunz. Especially in the period since the end of World War II Professor Kunz wrote against the prevailing tendency to regard the idea of law-in-war as little more than a relic from the pre-nuclear age. The Vietnam War has emphasized, although the Korean War, the three Middle Eastern wars, and the many lesser wars throughout the world since 1945 should have made it plain, that the development of nuclear weapons did not mark the end of so-called conventional warfare, nor assure us that there would be either peace or catastrophe in world society. The massacre at Son My was, I suppose, the most macabre possible demonstration that the law of war remains relevant, and that its effective enforcement would mitigate the horrifying experience of warfare for a society torn apart by struggling armies.

    But there is a danger of misunderstanding. The most minimal reading of customary rules of international law prohibits the acts that took place at Son My, and yet they happened. Rules of international law do not assure conforming conduct unless the military and civilian leadership of the armed forces gives these rules active and genuine respect and unless the official tactics of the war are themselves sensitive to the basic principles of limitation on warfare embodied in the rules of customary and treaty international law.

    Thus, new rules more responsive to the actualities of contemporary warfare would offer no assurance of their respect. An entire political climate of support for such rules must be brought into being. In working, then, for the reform and revitalization of the laws of war – the essence of Professor Kunz's eloquent plea – it is essential to work for a new political climate, as well as to urge the adoption of new rules and procedures for interpretation and enforcement. The Vietnam War has amply demonstrated how easily modern man and the modern state – with all its claim of civility – relapse into barbarism in the course of pursuing belligerent objectives in a distant land where neither national territory nor national security is tangibly at stake.

Peoples' Tribunals and International Law
  • Edited by Andrew Byrnes, Gabrielle Simm
  • Published online:
    28 December 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018
  • Peoples' Tribunals and International Law is the first book to analyse how civil society tribunals implement and develop international law. With contributions covering tribunals in Europe, Latin America and Asia, this edited collection provides cross-disciplinary academic and activist perspectives and unique insights into the phenomenon of peoples' tribunals. Written by academics in law, anthropology and international relations, it also incorporates the reflections of civil society activists and advocates on peoples' tribunals. The collection includes chapters ranging from the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, successor to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal established to question the legality of the Vietnam War, to recent tribunals addressing atrocities in Soeharto's Indonesia and violations against migrants in Europe. Peoples' Tribunals and International Law offers the first sustained analysis of the different approaches to international law in tribunal proceedings. It will interest scholars of law, criminology, human rights, politics, sociology, anthropology and international relations.

  • 1 - A Vietnam Settlement: The View from Hanoi

  • from PART I - THE US ROLE IN VIETNAM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
  • Edited by Stefan Andersson, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    Revisiting the Vietnam War and International Law
    Published online:
    28 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 December 2017, pp 3-19

  • Summary

    There are several reasons why I think it useful to circulate this memorandum concerning my visit to North Vietnam in June of 1968:

  • (1) To describe conversations with leaders of the North Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front that shed some light on the distinction between “hard” and “soft” negotiating issues;

  • (2) To convey my central impression that the cumulative attitude of the North Vietnamese government toward the outcome of negotiations accords more closely with official American conditions for peace in Vietnam than has been generally understood in this country;

  • (3) To call attention to the fact that the North Vietnamese government thinks that it has already backed down from earlier negotiating demands, and seems prepared to take an especially conciliatory position on the central question of the reunification of Vietnam;

  • (4) To convey a sense of why I think the formation of the Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces is an important political development whether or not it is a front of the Front;

  • (5) To convey some impression of the human quality of the political leadership in Hanoi and of the destructive impact that American war policies have had upon North Vietnam;

  • (6) To report upon the degree to which there remains in North Vietnam an awareness and appreciation of America's own revolutionary tradition and an eventual hope for the establishment of normal diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations;

  • (7) To give some report on why the leaders of North Vietnam now feel that they were deceived by President Johnson's offer of peace negotiations on March 31, 1968.

    • This memorandum summarizes my impressions bearing on settling the Vietnam War. Although I have been convinced for some years that the American role in the Vietnam War has been misconceived and improper, I have tried to keep my opinions from shading my report of attitudes and conditions in North Vietnam. One can never be sure that preconceptions have not shaped perceptions, but I have certainly tried to adhere to the canons of objective reportage. The fact that what I report is at variance with what many Americans believe merely confirms my strong sense that it is important for as many of our citizens as possible to go to North Vietnam and see for themselves.

  • 10 - A Nuremberg Perspective on the Trial of Karl Armstrong

  • from PART III - THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE NUREMBERG PRINCIPLES
  • Edited by Stefan Andersson, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    Revisiting the Vietnam War and International Law
    Published online:
    28 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 December 2017, pp 287-299

  • Summary

    There is considerable disagreement over the extent of the Nuremberg obligation, especially when it is used to justify opposing an illegal war, as was attempted on a number of occasions by Americans resisting the United States involvement in Indochina. At issue in particular is the claim of an ordinary citizen to engage in violent acts of resistance, illegal under domestic law, in opposition to a war that can reasonably be considered to violate international treaties and to defy basic moral precepts. The broader question is whether a movement for global reform, which includes among its goals the elimination of the war system, should, as one of its operative principles, renounce reliance on violent tactics.

    In the years since the Nuremberg judgment of 1945, no official attempt has been made to apply the Nuremberg Principles to the concrete circumstances of violent conflict. An unofficial and symbolic application of the Nuremberg idea underlay the proceedings of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal held in 1967 in two Scandinavian countries. The proceedings of the tribunal depict accurately the basic pattern of combat violations of the laws of war characteristic of the early years of heavy American involvement in Vietnam. Aside from this single controversial incident, there has been no effort by governments, international institutions, or public opinion to take seriously the justly celebrated American pledge at Nuremberg of the chief prosecutor for the United States, Justice Robert H. Jackson: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

    Even as Justice Jackson uttered these sentiments on behalf of the United States, there were grounds for suspicion. After all, the Allied powers after World War II did not allow inquiry into the legal status of their own war policies, even though their obliteration bombing of cities in Germany and Japan and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not easily be reconciled with prevailing views of the restraints embodied in rules of international law applicable at the time.

  • 13 - The Vietnam Syndrome: From the Gulf of Tonkin to Iraq

  • from PART IV - THE LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM WAR
  • Edited by Stefan Andersson, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    Revisiting the Vietnam War and International Law
    Published online:
    28 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 December 2017, pp 352-377

  • Summary

    At 11:37 p.m. on August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that US air attacks against North Vietnam were underway in response to “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America” in the Gulf of Tonkin. The president was referring to North Vietnamese PT-boat attacks on two American destroyers – the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy – that he said had occurred earlier that day, and to his decision to order a reprisal bombing of North Vietnam. Minutes later, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara reported that the US military reprisal was an “appropriate action in view of the unprovoked attack in international waters on United States naval vessels.”

    The next day, August 5, the eight-column headline on the front page of the New York Times reported:

    US PLANES ATTACK NORTH VIETNAM BASES; PRESIDENT ORDERS “LIMITED” RETALIATION AFTER COMMUNISTS’ PT BOATS RENEW RAIDS.

    The lead front-page story on the incident said that the president's order to bomb North Vietnam “followed a naval battle in which a number of North Vietnamese PT boats attacked two United States destroyers with torpedoes.”

    A second front-page story reported that McNamara “said that the [US air] attacks had been directed against the bases used by the North Vietnamese PT boats that attacked two United States destroyers in international waters yesterday.”

    In a third front-page story that day on the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Times reported that “the Defense Department announced tonight that North Vietnamese PT Boats made a ‘deliberate attack’ today on two United States destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam.” Throughout its news coverage of the Tonkin incident that day and the days that followed, the Times reported the North Vietnamese attacks on the Maddox and Turner Joy on August 4 as established events as claimed by top Johnson administration officials. The Times editorial page, on August 5, in effect confirmed those events, arguing that President Johnson had presented “the American people last night with the somber facts.”

  • Territorial Disputes and Their Resolution in the Recent Jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice

  • HUGH THIRLWAY
  • Journal:
    Leiden Journal of International Law / Volume 31 / Issue 1 / March 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    10 December 2017, pp. 117-146
    Print publication:
    March 2018

  • The workload of the International Court of Justice in recent years has increasingly featured cases of disputes classified either as ‘territorial disputes’ or as ‘boundary disputes’, or otherwise involving the Court in considerations of the law relating to acquisition or transmission of territory, or to the creation, location and effect of territorial frontiers. The present survey analyzes the contributions to international law of the Court's decisions in these recent cases. Matters examined include the significance of the terms ‘boundary dispute’ or ‘territorial dispute’; the definition of what constitutes sovereign territory; titles and effectivités as bases for territorial claims; decolonization and the uti possidetis juris; use of natural features or of straight lines as boundaries; and relations across a frontier once established.

Page 423 of 1233