Book

Littérature grise

International humanitarian law transparency

Lesley Wexler

[S.l.] : [s.n.], [2013]

[16] p. ; 30 cm

English

Photocopies

Demands for enhanced public transparency span the range of IHL activities: the classification of conflicts, the sorting of combatants and civilians, the numbers of civilian casualties, the deployment of unlawful weapons, conditions of detention, the use of coercive interrogation, its facilitation via extraordinary rendition, and punishment for unlawful activities. Part I begins by broadly contextualizing some of the most frequently deployed mechanisms of public transparency (Official acknowledgement by governments, third parties actors revelations, disclosure obligations made mandatory by domestic law, ...). Part II uses a 2010 German ordered air strike in Kunduz, Afghanistan to investigate the role of various transparency mechanisms in the current IHL climate. The strike raised such questions as whether an armed conflict existed, what rules of IHL applied, what the facts on the ground were concerning civilian casualties, and whether government actors had lied or engaged in a cover up. Part III turns to the substantive content of IHL itself to survey existing and possible future transparency requirements. While legal scholars have exhaustively discussed domestic information forcing statutes, they have written much less about how IHL itself can be used as a tool to compel disclosure. While such requirements would still require domestic implementation, they affect transparency on a global scale. This paper concludes by noting the contours of this new IHL frontier. What normative priors inform this frontier? What questions demand further research? What sort of reforms need to be assessed?

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