scholarly journals Does the end justify the means? The FARC and drug trafficking as a related crime

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (32) ◽  
pp. 841-856
Author(s):  
Esteban Arratia-Sandoval ◽  
Diego Jimenez-Cabrera ◽  
Aldo Barria-Jorquera
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Funding Source ◽  
Theoretical Relationship ◽  
Drug Smuggling ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Crime

The use of drug trafficking as the main funding source of The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) led to its consideration in the Havana peace talks. If its rebellion was financed by drug smuggling, this would compel the Special Jurisdiction for Peace to consider it as a related crime to political crime in the Final Agreement’s framework, prompting the question, is it legally possible to consider drug-trafficking a related crime? This article is structured into five sections. The first, historically describes the context in which the armed conflict evolved. The second discusses the theoretical relationship between drug trafficking, international conflict, and international law. The third analyzes the concepts of political crime and related crime according to doctrinal debate. From a legal stance, the fourth validates if drug trafficking constitutes a related crime. From these, conclusions are drawn.

The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Armed Conflict

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Cultural Property ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

TheHandbookconsists of 32 Chapters in seven parts. Part I provides the historical background and sets out some of the contemporary challenges. Part II considers the relevant sources of international law. Part III describes the different legal regimes: land warfare, air warfare, maritime warfare, the law of occupation, the law applicable to peace operations, and the law of neutrality. Part IV introduces key concepts in international humanitarian law: weapons and the notion of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, the principle of distinction, proportionality, genocide and crimes against humanity, grave breaches and war crimes, internal armed conflict. Part V looks at key rights: the right to life, the prohibition on torture, the right to fair trial, economic, social and cultural rights, the protection of the environment, the protection of cultural property, and the human rights of the members of the armed forces. Part VI covers key issues such as: the use of force, terrorism, unlawful combatants, the application of human rights in times of armed conflict, forced migration, and issues of gender. Part VII deals with accountability issues including those related to private security companies, the need to focus on armed groups, as well as questions of state responsibility brought before national courts, and finally, the book addresses issues related to transitional justice.

The Obama Administration and Targeting “War-Sustaining” Objects in Noninternational Armed Conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Goodman
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Law Of Armed Conflict ◽  
Economic Infrastructure ◽  
Significant Attention

Since September 11, 2001, legal experts have focused significant attention on the lethal targeting of individuals by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. An equally significant legacy of the post-9/11 administrations, however, may be the decisions to target specific kinds of objects. Those decisions greatly affect the success of U.S. efforts to win ongoing conflicts, such as the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). These decisions may also become precedents for military attacks that states consider lawful, whether carried out by cyber or kinetic means, in future armed conflicts.To achieve the goal of destroying ISIL, President Obama embraced what many in the international law community long regarded as off-limits: targeting war-sustaining capabilities, such as the economic infrastructure used to generate revenue for an enemy's armed forces. Although the weight of scholarly opinion has for years maintained that such objects are not legitimate military targets, the existing literature on this topic is highly deficient. Academic discussion has yet to grapple with some of the strongest and clearest evidence in support of the U.S. view on the legality of such targeting decisions. Indeed, intellectual resources may be better spent not on the question of whether such objects are legitimate military targets under the law of armed conflict, but on second-order questions, such as how to apply proportionality analysis and how to identify limiting principles to guard against unintentional slippery slopes. In this article, I discuss the legal pedigree for war-sustaining targeting. I then turn to identify some of the most significant second-order questions and how we might begin to address them.

scholarly journals ARMED CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH-EAST OF UKRAINE: LEGAL QUALIFI-CATIONS AND CONSEQUENCES

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-412
Author(s):  
Petr P. Kremnev
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
The South ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Legal Consequences

Unconstitutional change of power in Ukraine as a result of the "Maidan revolution" in February 2014, with the subsequent power grab by Ukrainian radicals of local authorities under nationalist slogans, led to the establishment of control over parts of the territory of Donetsk and Lugansk regions by Donbass militias, and then to the ongoing fighting between the armed formations of the latter with units of the regular armed forces of Ukraine. The purpose of this publication is to establish the form of the armed conflict and its legal consequences from the standpoint of current international law, which has not yet found proper legal analysis and coverage in either domestic or foreign (including Ukrainian) legal doctrinе. In official statements and legislative acts of Ukraine, this conflict is declared as a "state of war with Russia", "aggression of Russia", and the Ukrainian doctrine of international law almost unanimously declares the need to apply to the conflict the norms of international humanitarian law and qualifies it as an international armed conflict. In this publication, on the basis of the analysis of existing international legal norms and legal doctrine, the qualification of existing forms of armed conflicts is carried out: war, international armed conflict, non-international armed conflict, internationalized armed conflict. This examines the legal consequences (or otherwise the obligations of the parties to the conflict) that are caused by each form of such armed conflict, that is concealed and ignored by the Ukrainian side. On the basis of the theoretical and legal analysis of the UN Charter, the relevant provisions of the Geneva conventions on the protection of victims of war of 1949 and Additional protocols I and II of 1977, the author qualifies the situation in the South-East of Ukraine as a non-international armed conflict and the obligation to comply with applicable legal norms by all parties to the conflict. At the same time, the author comes to the conclusion about the insolvency of the claims about the applicability of the rules governing other mentioned forms of armed conflicts.

scholarly journals Deciphering FARC was to Disarm it. Razón Pública’s Framing of FARC

Co-herencia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (34) ◽  
pp. 193-230
Author(s):  
Emilio Calderon Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Close Reading

This article analyzes the framing of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC-EP) in Razón Pública, a Colombian digital magazine, from July 2008 to July 2018. The article’s methodology combines Natural Language Processing and close reading. Results indicate that the magazine’s language primarily framed FARC as a protagonist of the peace process, and, secondarily, as an actor of Colombia’s armed conflict and drug trafficking. Shortly after Juan Manuel Santos’ first inauguration as Colombian president (2010-2014), some authors forecasted that the conditions were ripe for a peace process with FARC. During the official negotiation, FARC was framed as enigmatic, and rational protagonist of a challenging peace process. Overall, the frames detected in this analysis are an echo of the UNDP Colombian Report (2003) that called for analytic journalism that improves the public’s understanding of the country’s complex armed conflict and proposes negotiated and military solutions.

Killing Citizens: Core Legal Dilemmas in the Targeted Killing Abroad of Canadian Foreign Fighters

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 134-187
Author(s):  
CRAIG FORCESE ◽  
LEAH WEST SHERRIFF
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Targeted Killing ◽  
Canadian Government ◽  
The United Kingdom

AbstractFor the first time since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada is in an armed conflict with an insurgency that has actively recruited Canadians and directed them to use or promote violence against Canada. In the result, the Canadian government may ask its soldiers to target and kill fellow Canadians abroad or to assist allies in doing so. This situation raises a host of novel legal issues, including the question of “targeted killing.” This matter arose for the United Kingdom in 2015 when it directed the use of military force against several Britons believed to be plotting a terrorist attack against the United Kingdom from abroad. This incident sparked a report from the British Parliament highlighting legal dilemmas. This article does the same for Canada by focusing on the main legal implications surrounding a targeted killing by the Canadian government of a Canadian citizen abroad. This exercise shows that a Canadian policy of targeted killing would oblige Canada to make choices on several weighty legal matters. First, the article discusses the Canadian public law rules that apply when the Canadian Armed Forces deploy in armed conflicts overseas. It then analyzes international law governing state uses of military force, including the regulation of the use of force (jus ad bellum) and the law of armed conflict (jus in bello). It also examines an alternative body of international law: that governing peacetime uses of lethal force by states. The article concludes by weaving together these areas of law into a single set of legal questions that would necessarily need to be addressed prior to the targeted killing of a Canadian abroad.

Newly Adopted Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child

2000 ◽  
Vol 94 (4) ◽  
pp. 789-796 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Dennis
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Child Pornography ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Vulnerable Children ◽  
Child Prostitution ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Rights Of The Child ◽  
Minimum Age ◽  
United Nations General Assembly

On May 25,2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus two Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child: the Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (Children in Armed Conflict Protocol) and the Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Pornography and Child Prostitution (Sale of Children Protocol).1 These instruments represent major advances in the international effort to strengthen and enforce norms for the protection of the most vulnerable children, who desperately need the world's attention. The Children in Armed Conflict Protocol deals realistically and reasonably with the difficult issues of minimum ages for compulsory recruitment, voluntary recruitment, and participation in hostilities. The Protocol raises the age for military conscription to eighteen from fifteen years, as stipulated under existing international law; obliges states parties to raise the minimum age for voluntary recruitment to an age above the current fifteen-year international standard; and requires states parties to take all feasible measures to ensure that personnel in their national armed forces who are not yet eighteen do not take a direct part in hostilities.

Classifying the conflict: a soldier's dilemma

2009 ◽  
Vol 91 (873) ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Carswell
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Military Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
The Law ◽  
Riot Control ◽  
The Military

AbstractModern armed forces are employed in a wide array of operations that range from peacetime riot control to outright international armed conflict. Classifying these various scenarios to determine the applicable international law is rendered difficult by both the lack of clarity inherent in the law and the political factors that tend to enter the decision-making process. The author describes the major challenges of legal classification facing the military leadership, and proposes a solution to ensure that the intended beneficiaries of the law – from soldiers to civilians – do indeed receive its protection.

The British Reoccupation and Colonization of the Falkland Islands, or Malvinas, 1832–1843

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry M. Gough
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Falkland Islands ◽  
South American ◽  
The Third ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Economic Considerations

In December 1832 and January 1833 the British reoccupied the Falkland Islands or the Malvinas. This reassertion of British sovereignty began an uninterrupted period of control that lasted until 2 April 1982, when armed forces of the Republic of Argentina forced the surrender of the British governor and garrison at Stanley, the capital of what the British had come to call “The Falkland Islands Dependency.” The Argentine occupation ended with a surrender to British arms on 14 June 1982. These celebrated events of recent times brought forth a fundamental question, here addressed: Why did the British possess the islands in the first place? The British government's motivation for reoccupying the Falklands in 1832–33 is insufficiently explained in existing historical literature, though the legal intricacies are known. Julius Goebel the Younger, a student of international law, termed the contest for sovereignty of the islands a “struggle.” However, his work, a study in international legal history, was not based on strategic, maritime, and economic considerations and, moreover, did not probe the question of British motivation in reoccupation. V. F. Boyson's history of the islands is a valuable survey but it inadequately investigates the same theme and the precise period under consideration. Other histories of the Falklands written in English do not examine the matter of motivation in depth. Argentine sources are extensive and see the British reoccupation as illegal. They tend at the same time to recite the arguments for sovereignty over the Malvinas; and one Argentine historian has called the reoccupation “the third English invasion,” in reference to two previous occupations by the British in 1765 and 1771. The following inquiry seeks to rectify these matters and is based on British documents, particularly in-letters of Commanders-in-Chief on the South American station. These reports to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty reveal two concerns: firstly, the infringement by Argentine and American traders and marine exploiters in territory and territorial waters traditionally claimed but not effectively occupied by the United Kingdom and, secondly, the importance of the Falklands as a base from which to safeguard the sea routes of the southern oceans.

scholarly journals Applicability of the international humanitarian law to the fight against the Islamic State during the 2013-2017 conflict in Iraq

2021 ◽  
Vol 200 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krystian Mularczyk ◽  
Karolina Saska
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
The United States ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
Law Of Armed Conflict

The article addresses the applicability of international humanitarian law during the armed conflict in Iraq in 2013-2017 waged against the Islamic State. The paper answers how to classify this conflict against the background of the law of armed conflict. The argumentation for considering it as a non-international conflict with the Islamic State and the Iraqi government as parties is presented. The discussed failure to recognize the Islamic State's status as a state within the meaning of international law does not classify the armed conflict as international. The classification has not been changed by the United States and allied states' intervention, which, as one at the invitation of the Iraqi government, does not mean qualifying the conflict as international. The article also discusses the scope of the norms of international humanitarian law that apply to the conflict in question. It primarily concerns Article 3 that is common to the Geneva Conventions and customary law. Protocol II supplementing the provisions of the Geneva Conventions will not apply as Iraq is not a signatory to it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document