Naval Blockade and the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen

A Saudi Arabia-led coalition is supporting the Yemeni Government with military means against the Houthis in Yemen. Part of those military operations are naval operations off the coast of Yemen that aim to stop the influx of weapons meant for the Houthis. It is viewed that these naval enforcement measures, often termed blockade, have a severe impact on the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen. As the blockade is seen to cause severe humanitarian distress and is leading to starvation, many feel that it has been unlawfully established. The law of blockade is a specific legal regime that regulates how belligerent blockades can be lawfully established and enforced. The question, however, is whether a belligerent blockade has in fact been established in the case of Yemen and whether, considering the circumstances of the Yemeni conflict, the law of blockade applies

Law in the virtual battlespace: the Tallin Manual and the Jus in Bello

Reports of cyber operations have increased so dramatically in recent years that they have become commonplace. The reality that most attacks to date have resulted in relatively benign consequences - inconvenience and offence through defacement of government websites and/or temporary suspension of access - only serves to heighten awareness of the damage that could result from much more serious attacks on networks controlling, for example, vital public transport and emergency infrastructure, the financial system and sensitive communications networks. The threat of apocalyptic consequences has galvanized States into proactive cyber defence measures - spawning an entirely new category of bureaucracy that until recently might readily have been cynically dismissed as manipulative fear-mongering to justify yet more human and financial resources allocated to the public sector. That governments should proactively mitigate emergent and potentially catastrophic risks is an a priori notion. Citizens of a State whose government did not take cyber defence seriously would be entitled to feel aggrieved - particularly in the aftermath of a serious cyber attack where the lack of proaction on the part of central authorities was exposed. In contrast, expectations should be significantly lower for any proactive clarification of the applicable international law. The making of new, or even the clarification of the content of existing, international law has tended to be more reactive - requiring a major catalyst to expose the need for either clarification or regulation. It has been rare in the history of international law for new development to pre-empt subsequent catastrophe

Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations: prepared by the International Groups of Experts at the Invitation of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence

Tallinn Manual 2.0 expands on the highly influential first edition by expanding the coverage of the international law applicable to cyber warfare to include the peacetime legal regimes.Although the Tallinn Manual 2.0 represents the views of the Group of Experts in their personal capacity, the project benefited from the unofficial input of many States and over 50 peer reviewer

Final Report ILA Study Group on the Conduct of Hostilities: The Conduct of Hostilities Under International Humanitarian Law: Challenges of 21st Century Warfare

The Study Group on the Conduct of Hostilities in the 21st Century (hereinafter the SG) was established in 2011 and conducted its first meeting in Sofia in 2012. It conducted a workshop in Leiden in November 2013. During this workshop, three general topics were explored. These were the relationship of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Human Rights Law in the conduct of military operations, technological challenges posed by new weapons systems and the function of the basic principles of IHL in the conduct of hostilities. An interim report on these topics was published and presented at the April 2014 Washington D.C. joint meeting of the ILA and the American Society of International Law. These topics were discussed further at a subsequent workshop held in Berlin at the Freie Universität in November of the same year. Attention was also devoted to the relationship of IHL with general international law and the place of IHL within the legal ‘pluriverse’ surrounding modern multinational military operations. The SG was unable to arrive at a consensus on a number of issues which arose, but the discussions were nevertheless extremely useful in highlighting some of the central questions related to the conduct of hostilities and focusing attention on the core area of the mandate; the legal challenges within IHL relating to the conduct of hostilities. It was decided in Berlin to refocus the work of the SG and the final report on those challenges and leave the broader questions of how IHL relates to other bodies of international law to further exploration in other forums