Armed Opposition Groups’ (And Foreign Fighters’) Abidance by International Human Rights Law: The Issue of Compliance in Syria and Iraq

This chapter will examine the extent to which International Human Rights Law (IHRL) regulates the activities of foreign fighters. Its starting point is that IHRL does not address foreign fighters as individual natural persons, but binds them in their quality as members of one of the parties to an internal strife. Their breaches of IHRL, therefore, may trigger the international responsibility of the entity which they are part of. On this assumption, the present investigation will aim at providing an answer to the following issues: (i) to what extent IHRL binds the parties to an internal conflict; (ii) under which conditions human rights violations committed by foreign fighters are attributable to them; and (iii) what legal consequences ensue from such violations. At variance with the general approach adopted in this volume, this chapter will focus solely on foreign fighters siding with armed opposition groups, since in relation to foreign elements fighting with governmental forces these issues are relatively uncontroversial and do not need further discussion. The analysis will be carried out by taking as case studies the internal conflicts ongoing in Syria and Iraq

Armed Opposition Groups’ (And Foreign Fighters’) Abidance by International Human Rights Law: The Issue of Compliance in Syria and Iraq

This chapter will examine the extent to which International Human Rights Law (IHRL) regulates the activities of foreign fighters. Its starting point is that IHRL does not address foreign fighters as individual natural persons, but binds them in their quality as members of one of the parties to an internal strife. Their breaches of IHRL, therefore, may trigger the international responsibility of the entity which they are part of. On this assumption, the present investigation will aim at providing an answer to the following issues: (i) to what extent IHRL binds the parties to an internal conflict; (ii) under which conditions human rights violations committed by foreign fighters are attributable to them; and (iii) what legal consequences ensue from such violations. At variance with the general approach adopted in this volume, this chapter will focus solely on foreign fighters siding with armed opposition groups, since in relation to foreign elements fighting with governmental forces these issues are relatively uncontroversial and do not need further discussion. The analysis will be carried out by taking as case studies the internal conflicts ongoing in Syria and Iraq

The Human Control Over Autonomous Robotic Systems: What Ethical and Legal Lessons for Judicial Uses of AI?

This contribution provides an overview of normative problems posed by increasingly autonomous robotic systems, with the goal of drawing significant lessons for the use of AI technologies in judicial proceedings, especially focusing on the shared control relationship between the human decision-maker (i.e. the judge) and the software system. The exemplary case studies that we zoom in concern two ethically and legally sensitive application domains for robotics: autonomous weapons systems and increasingly autonomous surgical robots. The first case study is expedient to delve into the normative acceptability issue concerning autonomous decision-making and action by robots. The second case study is used to investigate the human responsibility issue in human-robot shared control regimes. The convergent implications of both case studies for the analysis of ethical and legal issues raised by judicial applications of AI enable one to highlight the need for and core contents of a genuinely meaningful human control to be exerted on the operational autonomy, if any, of AI systems in judicial proceedings

Breaking a 'Taboo': the case for a dynamic approach to secessionist claims

The essay deals with secession, that from a legal point of view presents a number of difficulties common to both the national dimension and the global one. Moving from a recognition of the evidences coming from a static and legalistic approach, relevant cases are analyzed in order to demonstrate the necessity in adopting alternative, dynamic approaches to secessionist phenomena in the academic debate

Stergiopoulos v. Iran. Order No. 39391/2021

In Angela Stergiopoulos v. Iran, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation held that state immunity does not bar exequatur proceedings against a foreign state when those proceedings seek the recognition and enforcement of a foreign judicial decision finding the state responsible for serious breaches of human rights. Stergiopoulos confirms the Italian courts’ persisting inclination to champion a human rights limitation to state immunity in contrast to mainstream transnational case law. It also reveals several legal and policy risks arising out of that position. Yet the decision should be seen in the context of a new constellation of states prioritizing human rights enforcement over state immunity, including Brazil and, at least in the Court’s view, the United States, especially given the availability under U.S. law of proceedings against states sponsors of terrorism accused of certain egregious violations of human rights

Toward a normative model of Meaningful Human Control over weapons systems

The notion of meaningful human control (MHC) has gathered overwhelming consensus and interest in the autonomous weapons systems (AWS) debate. By shifting the focus of this debate to MHC, one sidesteps recalcitrant definitional issues about the autonomy of weapons systems and profitably moves the normative discussion forward. Some delegations participating in discussions at the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems meetings endorsed the notion of MHC with the proviso that one size of human control does not fit all weapons systems and uses thereof. Building on this broad suggestion, we propose a “differentiated”—but also “principled” and “prudential”—framework for MHC over weapons systems. The need for a differentiated approach—namely, an approach acknowledging that the extent of normatively required human control depends on the kind of weapons systems used and contexts of their use—is supported by highlighting major drawbacks of proposed uniform solutions. Within the wide space of differentiated MHC profiles, distinctive ethical and legal reasons are offered for principled solutions that invariably assign to humans the following control roles: (1) “fail-safe actor,” contributing to preventing the weapon's action from resulting in indiscriminate attacks in breach of international humanitarian law; (2) “accountability attractor,” securing legal conditions for international criminal law (ICL) responsibility ascriptions; and (3) “moral agency enactor,” ensuring that decisions affecting the life, physical integrity, and property of people involved in armed conflicts be exclusively taken by moral agents, thereby alleviating the human dignity concerns associated with the autonomous performance of targeting decisions. And the prudential character of our framework is expressed by means of a rule, imposing by default the more stringent levels of human control on weapons targeting. The default rule is motivated by epistemic uncertainties about the behaviors of AWS. Designated exceptions to this rule are admitted only in the framework of an international agreement among states, which expresses the shared conviction that lower levels of human control suffice to preserve the fail-safe actor, accountability attractor, and moral agency enactor requirements on those explicitly listed exceptions. Finally, we maintain that this framework affords an appropriate normative basis for both national arms review policies and binding international regulations on human control of weapons systems

Evaluation of the Geo-Mechanical Properties Property Recovery in Time of Conditioned Soil for EPB-TBM Tunneling

The soil conditioning is a process of fundamental importance during the excavation of tunnels with Earth Pressure Balance full face machine. The soil conditioning is achieved through the addition of foam at the excavation face and in the bulk chamber that modifies the natural soil properties from solid-like to fluid-like with a pulpy behavior. Clearly, a material with a pulpy or fluid-like consistency is not suitable for the construction of embankments of landfill or for other civil purposes. It is therefore important to have a procedure able to identify how long it is necessary before the conditioned soil recovers its geo-mechanical properties, since this knowledge is needed at the design stages from a logistic point of view. The paper proposes and discusses a procedure to find out whether and when the conditioned soil gets back to its original properties. The procedure foresees direct shear tests, vane tests, Proctor tests, and rotational mixer tests at different time schedules from the production of the conditioned soil in the laboratory. The conditioned soil samples have been cured in a controlled environment up to 60 days from the conditioning. Thanks to these tests, it is possible to assess if and when the soil recovers its natural behavior or if a permanent alteration is induced. The proposed procedure has been applied to a standard alluvial soil showing that most of the original properties of the soil are recovered already after seven days from the conditioning. The carried-out tests have shown that the procedure is feasible and easy to apply