Arbitrary execution 28 Oct 2009 Question: If a state kills people of some country not their own, because they think but have not shown in a court of law that those people have committed a crime, and the people are not combatants of a legally recognised enemy state, is this legal? Most jurisprudence would suggest it is not, and is against international law. So, what about the use of drones to bomb suspected terrorists? Politics
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It’s truly depressing that there were people who actually had to be told that there was something wrong with it.
Then it would be illegal to kill terrorists? They aren’t combatants of a legally recognised state. Should we wait for a court (whose court?) to say they’re guilty, do they have to have attacked/killed some one. Osama Bin laden has never, to my knowledge, been a front line terrorist. Is he therefore innocent?
This situation is more complicated than it first appears. In general, fighting against guerrilla warfare one has to be able to attack non-uniformed individuals based on intelligence and similar data without trials. I don’t think anyone prior to about 30 years ago would have claimed otherwise. Does that mean that you need to be careful not to attack the wrong people yes? But that doesn’t necessitate court proceedings prior to every single skirmish.
It is complex, which is why I posed the issue as a question. Here’s a piece on what the complexities may be.
I don’t think it is complex at all, at least as far as the basic moral and legal issues are concerned. It is in general illegal to kill terrorists, which is why we usually put them on trial first; military action is taken not against ‘terrorists’ in general but enemy soldiers, and there are laws and rules governing how people come to be considered enemy soldiers and how enemy soldiers are to be treated. There is no more a problem with the fact that they aren’t combatants of a legally recognized state than there is with the fact that pirates and warlord-led thugs aren’t combatants of a legally recognized state; handling such people is far from being a startlingly new thing in the annals of international law: Even a hostis humani generis has jurisprudential protections, although not generally a prior trial. The jurisprudential and moral bases for such actions as these particular drone attacks are not at all clear. So to that extent, I don’t think it is complex — what is complex are our reasons for allowing so much leeway on this question to a superpower that is leaping first and justifying later.
Brandon, that’s charming but more ideological than practical. You are dealing with literally thousands of people who are functioning as a military force in all ways but the fact that they deliberately don’t wear uniforms to make it difficult for the armies trying to actually play be the rules.