Implementation of International Humanitarian Law in Future Wars

Any attempt to look into the future is fraught with difficulty and the likelhood that much of it will be wrong. If someone in 1898 had tried to foresee issues relating to the implementation of the laws and customs of war in the twentieth century, it is highly unlikely that he could have forseen many of the makor developements that these created

Military objectives in cyber warfare

This Chapter discusses the possible problems arising from the application of the principle of distinction under the law of armed conflict to cyber attacks. It first identifies when cyber attacks qualify as ‘attacks’ under the law of armed conflict and then examines the two elements of the definition of ‘military objective’ contained in Article 52(2) of the 1977 Protocol I additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Protection of Victims of War. The Chapter concludes that this definition is flexible enough to apply in the cyber context without significant problems and that none of the challenges that characterize cyber attacks hinders the application of the principle of distinction