Rights under International Humanitarian Law

The idea of ‘rights’ under the law of war historically referred to state or belligerent rights – that is, rights to engage in actions not permitted under the law of peace. The different sense of rights of individuals was absent from those traditional accounts of the law, and whether individuals are granted rights (for example, of prisoners of war to be humanely treated, of civilians not to be targeted) under contemporary international humanitarian law (IHL) remains contested. This article explores how this debate has developed in recent history. It argues that clear support for the notion of individual rights during the drafting of the 1907 Hague Convention IV and subsequent treaties seemed to be overtaken by state practice in the area of war reparations, only to re-emerge in more recent practice that, in part, is shown to be a result of a more legalized approach to the invocation of responsibility for IHL violations. This growing support for the individual rights perspective of IHL is then juxtaposed with the re-emergence of state rights. The article concludes that these two different notions of ‘rights’ under IHL present two fundamentally opposing visions for the law’s role in regulating armed conflict

Humanitarian law, human rights law and the bifurcation of armed conflict

This article offers a fresh examination of the distinction drawn in international humanitarian law (IHL) between international and non-international armed conflicts. In particular, it considers this issue from the under-explored perspective of the influence of international human rights law (IHRL). It is demonstrated how, over time, the effect of IHRL on this distinction in IHL has changed dramatically. Whereas traditionally IHRL encouraged the partial elimination of the distinction between types of armed conflict, more recently it has been invoked in debates in a manner that would preserve what remains of the distinction. By exploring this important issue, it is hoped that the present article will contribute to the ongoing debates regarding the future development of the law of non-international armed conflict

Moralized Theories of Coercion: A Critical Analysis

Part I of this Article briefly lays out the taxonomy of various theories of coercion and then describes Wertheimer's theory. Part II of the piece analyzes and critiques moralized accounts generally, with particular emphasis upon Wertheimer's version of the moralized theory. Finally, Part ll sketches the departure point for an alternative to both moralized theories and the more traditional accounts which explain coercion as a function of the overborne will

A Third Theory of Liberty: The Evolution of Our Conception of Freedom in American Constitutional Thought

With the publication of Isaiah Berlin\u27s essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, liberals and their adversaries came to view their respective positions as expressions of a deeper philosophical gulf between two opposed ideas of freedom - what Kant first dubbed the negative and positive ideas of liberty. Negative liberty, or freedom from, represented the classical liberal conception of freedom, while positive liberty or freedom to is vouchsafed by civic republicans, progressive liberals, socialists and others. Negative liberty was associated with the absence of constraint and, more specifically, with individual rights and limits upon government power while positive liberty was usually interpreted as collective self-government. This Article argues that the distinctly American conception of liberty transcends the negative-positive dichotomy and seeks to demonstrate that the American ideal of liberty is distinctive for its commitment to individual self-determination. The piece argues that individual self-determination can only take place in the context of a social structure that protects the values of diversity, association and statement and seeks to show how the Madisonian, progressive liberal and communitarian conceptions of society represent varying responses to changing conditions in the service of a single concept of liberty as selfdetermination within a balanced society

Information Technology and Computing Topics and Their Relevance to Medical Undergraduate and Graduate Program Curricula at RIT

Two healthcare domain related programs in which this author has curricular relationships are the undergraduate Diagnostic Ultrasound (DU), and the graduate Master of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI). He teaches one course in the former and is the program coordinator for the latter. The undergraduate course is titled, “Computers in Medicine”, and is a rough 50% combination of a first-semester computing hardware course taught to our IT undergrads and another 50% of material from a textbook covering all the ways in which computing has benefitted various healthcare domains like, surgery, pharmacy, imaging, dentistry, psychiatry, remote medicine and the like. The MSHI program is a 30 semester credit hour program offered in an online format with a capstone experience (no thesis required) that was designed for professionals expecting to retool themselves for continued employment in a healthcare setting. This paper will discuss the details of the DU course and the MSHI program, the kind of computing content covered in each, and the rationale for and program design input of each. In conclusion, the reader will be left with an understanding of the what, when, how and why computing topics are necessarily required by these curricula, our justification for such, and how we might use that information in the development of future healthcare-related computing courses and potential programs. Course definition and program outline documents will be attached as appendices to the paper