Before the start of business, Just Security provides a curated summary of up-to-the-minute developments at home and abroad. Here’s today’s news.
SYRIA
Crisis talks in New York aimed at reviving the ceasefire ended without resolution yesterday, reports Al Jazeera.… continue »
A powerful body of the UK Parliament, the Committees of Arms Export Controls, has stated in a draft report that billions of dollars in UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia should be halted due to the risk that such transfers will be used by the Saudis to commit serious violations of the law of armed conflict in Yemen.… continue »
US and UK support for Saudi-led military operations in Yemen have received significant attention recently due to reports of strikes that damaged or destroyed hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure vital to the civilian population. When international lawyers consider the rules that apply to such assistance, the so-called law of State responsibility consumes most, if not all, of the attention (see Miles Jackson and my accompanying post that does a deep dive into that area of law).… continue »
What exactly is the definition of war crimes under international law or, more precisely, what mental state is required to commit such an offence? The synopsis below provides an answer with respect to military strikes that result in civilian casualties and destruction of civilian property.… continue »
In a lengthy post yesterday, Greg Nojeim and Ross Shulman take aim at the newly proposed legislation from DOJ that would permit the cross-border sharing of data for law enforcement purposes—as well Andrew Woods and my endorsement of these efforts. In several key respects, we all four agree.… continue »
The US war on encryption has quieted down recently. The San Bernardino and Brooklyn court cases concerning encrypted iPhones both ended this spring not with a bang, but with a whimper. The disastrous Burr-Feinstein anti-crypto bill has gone dormant — for now.… continue »
In a hallway of The New York Times offices, there is a framed copy of the Telex traffic between the Justice Department and The Times from June 1971 when the government demanded that the paper cease publishing the Pentagon Papers. Two installments had already appeared by then.… continue »
Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) handed down its third, and in some ways most important, sentence in its short existence. The court sentenced Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former military commander from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to 18 years’ imprisonment for the crimes of murder, rape, and pillage committed by his soldiers in the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2002–2003.… continue »
Now that the cell phones in San Bernardino and Brooklyn have been unlocked (no thanks to Apple), FBI warnings about “going dark” in the face of advancing digital encryption seem less urgent than before. Perhaps there are other ways — buying exploits in the zero-day market, plea bargaining pressure — to skin the encryption cat, after all.… continue »
Last week, at an event co-hosted by Just Security and NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the NSA’s Civil Liberties and Privacy Director Rebecca Richards dropped the ball. When asked whether Americans should be comfortable with our current surveillance regime should someone like Donald Trump become president, she gave a milquetoast answer obviously intended to comfort the uninitiated.… continue »
