Article

The duty to capture

Jens David Ohlin

• Minnesota Law Review, Vol. 97, no. 4, 2013, p. 1268-1342

English

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The article examines the duty to capture and the divergent approaches that each legal regime takes to this normative requirement, and evaluates internal debates within these regimes over when a duty to capture might apply. Part I begins by examining the scope of international humanitarian law (IHL); concludes that its application is often unduly constrained; and offers a new analysis of the classification of armed conflicts, the level of organization required before a non-state actor can be a party to an armed conflict, and the legal geography of armed conflict. Part II examines the concept of necessity and concludes that military necessity is fundamentally incompatible with human-rights law and its understanding of necessity as the least-restrictive means. Finally, Part III concludes that the IHL regime, and its permissive notion of military necessity, should apply when the state is acting as a belligerent against other co-equal belligerents, but that human-rights law, and its more restrictive notion of necessity, should apply when the state acts as a sovereign over its own subjects. However, being a U.S. citizen does not automatically make an individual a "subject" under a sovereign, as opposed to a belligerent. Rather, this article concludes that belligerency is always a relationship between collectives, and that the relevant question is whether the United States stands in a relationship of belligerency to a non-state organization of which the individual is a member.

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