Last week, responding to Jane Mayer's report, I posted on the ethics of drone strikes in Pakistan, particularly on the fact that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have failed to capitalize on anger surrounding the strikes because of their brutal reactions -- which involve killing nearby civilians who they suspect of being CIA informants. The lawyers Mayer talked to concluded the strikes were probably legal, but Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions suggested yesterday that they might break international prohibitions on extrajudicial executions:
The problem with the United States, he said, was that it was making increasing use of drones and “Predators” to fight conflicts in which it was involved, prominently in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The concern was that those weapons were being operated in a framework that might violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.The United States position was untenable, he said, in that it claimed that the Human Rights Council (the successor to the Commission on Human Rights) and the General Assembly, by definition, had no role in relation to killings that took place during armed conflict. That position would remove the great majority of issues that came before those bodies. By example, he said the whole set of issues arising in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the Goldstone report (on the war in Gaza), in Kenya, in Sri Lanka, all concerned areas of armed conflicts. If the United States position were applied, then none of those issues should be discussed by the relevant United Nations bodies.
I'll just rely on Mayer's article for this one:
[I]n order for the U.S. government to legally target civilian terror suspects abroad it has to define a terrorist group as the one engaging in armed conflict, and the use of force must be a "military necessity." There must be no reasonable alternative to killing, such as capture, and to warrant death the target must be "directly participating in hostilities. The use of force has to be considered "proportionate to the threat." Finally the foreign nation in which such targeted killing takes place has to give its permission.So the U.S. definitely has Pakistan's permission, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are certainly engaged in armed conflict against the United States, but a number of the other conditions seem pretty subjective -- particularly if there are bystanders that might be affected.
-- A. Serwer
