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This essay examines the interpretation of the core international treaty dedicated to the elimination of racial discrimination, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and in particular how the prohibition on race discrimination applies to the treatment of migrants. This essay is timely, as CERD has travelled from the margins of human rights law to the center of the hottest interstate lawfare. At the time of writing, the first ever interstate dispute before any UN treaty body is before the CERD Committee, and CERD has been invoked in several interstate cases before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unfortunately, this crucible of adjudication has not marked an increase in principled interpretation. This essay critiques the recent admissibility ruling of the ICJ in Qatar v. U.A.E. for its marginalization of the prohibition of race discrimination, in particular the failure meaningfully to consider how nationality discrimination may constitute prohibited race discrimination.

This is an entry into a collective journal of the twenty-first century years of plague. It introduces the notion of ‘lawfare’ by way of the contemporary case concerning Lula da Silva and Brazil’s fall from grace. The latter is presented as an instance of violence in the international context, the managerial attitude to global disasters and, indeed, a plague. It chronicles the social struggles around the case and on that basis builds a somewhat playful manifesto for a new relationship between legal scholarship, the law school and the imaginary of permanent catastrophe and plague.

Northern Ireland has no effective process to address legacy of the human tragedy of decades of conflict. And yet during that conflict, and especially in the years since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement 1998, people have employed multiple legal mechanisms to gain information about events which affected them and their loved ones. Human rights challenges, public inquiries, freedom of information requests, police investigations and fresh inquests have all contributed to a patchwork of approaches to truth recovery. The UK Government has long viewed these efforts with suspicion; as the primary state actor involved in the conflict its records provide a much richer source of information about historic wrongs than the recollections of members of clandestine paramilitary organisations. Successive Conservative administrations have characterised many of these efforts as “lawfare”, intended to persecute veterans long after the events in question and undermine public faith in the UK’s Armed Forces. One under-explored element of this complex picture is use of tort in legacy cases. Civil actions, supported by legal aid funding in Northern Ireland, provide a potential avenue for the discovery of information held by public bodies. Even unsuccessful actions can thus contribute new information about the events in question. Many of the harms inflicted during the conflict were torts as well as crimes, and this article assesses the extent to which these civil actions provide an ersatz mechanism for truth recovery, and challenges efforts to curtail such actions as a “witch-hunt”.

The paper sets out to establish a basis for research into the role of litigation involving business entities as part of the larger project of regulating business activity for sustainability. The paper frames the wave of climate litigation against companies in domestic courts alongside the expanding practice of domestic legal actions against business alleging human rights abuses. Drawing on case law databases, the paper develops a taxonomy of litigation involving business entities, across fields of litigation normally fragmented by legal regime and jurisdiction. Based on the substance of these cases, the paper identifies four broad categories of litigation - biosphere violations, eco-human toxicity, predation, and corporate lawfare – and describes the main dimensions in each category. The substance of these cases reflect attempts to enforce legal standards of sustainability against business entities or, in the case of corporate lawfare, to challenge attempts to corporate accountability for their impacts on people and the planet. The paper suggests that by framing the substance of these cases as part of a set of cases involving business entities, we may better understand the place of litigation in general, and counter corporate litigation in particular, as a legal tool in the development of regulation designed to secure sustainability. The paper is a result of research conducted as part of the project Sustainable Market Actors and Responsible Trade (SMART, EU Horizon 2020) Faculty of Law, University of Oslo.

Contemporary shifts in technology are celebrated for empowering human rights defenders and generating prosperity, but they also enable new forms of human rights violations. This article traces the evolving legal and regulatory challenges posed by drones across two distinct waves of debate. The first involved questions about the legality of weaponized drones in foreign airspaces. The second has centered on the domestication of the technology in American and European airspaces. This article argues that the legal gaps exposed in both waves are not an inevitable side effect of drone technology but are the result of key actors opportunistically using new capabilities to exploit existing rules or even to produce new ones—a process known as lawfare. This linkage between technology and lawfare is important because the drone debates encapsulate many of the core challenges surrounding emerging technologies such as algorithmic decision-making, autonomous vehicles, and big data. Lawfare over unpiloted aircraft is a prelude to the struggles ahead.

For many years, the network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming a human rights agenda has consistently sought to delegitimise Israel’s counterterrorism strategy. This phenomenon was prominent during the 2008–2009 and 2014 Gaza wars, when these groups issued hundreds of statements condemning Israel, and in campaigns calling for UN commissions of inquiry (e.g. the Goldstone and Schabas/Davis investigations) into Israeli ‘war crimes’. NGO allegations were also the foundations of lawfare, including efforts to prosecute Israeli officials in the International Criminal Court and other venues, and for BDS campaigns against Israeli and Jewish targets. In this soft-power strategy, the perception of NGO officials as ‘security experts’ provides a major source of legitimacy, lending credence to their reports, despite the lack of credible fact-finding methodologies. Similarly, NGO legal analyses, based on problematic and aspirational interpretations, are accepted and echoed widely, without indepen...

Contents Table of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Contributors 1. What Does the Future Hold for International Courts? 2. Critical Junctures and the Future of International Courts in a Post-Liberal World Order Part I: Regional Challenges 3. India and International Dispute Settlement: Some Reflections on India's Participation in International Courts and Tribunals 4. China's Attitude towards International Adjudication: Past, Present and Future 5. The Crisis of the European Court of Human Rights in the Face of Authoritarian and Populist Regimes 6. 'Taking Back Control? Brexit and the Court of Justice' Part II: Institutional Challenges 7. The Functions of the International Court of Justice: Tending to the Law While Settling Disputes? 8. Delegitimation of Global Courts: Lessons from the Past 9. The Future of Investor-State Dispute Settlement 10. Learning lessons through the prism of legitimacy: What future for International Criminal Courts and Tribunals? Part III: Procedural Challenges 11. How the application of teachings can affect the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice 12. Towards Separate Opinions at the Court of Justice of the European Union: Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the International Court of Justice and Elsewhere 13. From Warfare to 'Lawfare': Increased Litigation and Rise of Parallel Proceedings in International Courts: A Case Study of Ukraine's and Georgia's Action Against the Russian Federation) 14. Amicus Curiae Participation in International Proceedings: Forever Friends? 15. Not Just a Wit, But a Cause of Wit in Others: The Influence of Human Rights in International Litigation 16. The Future of International Courts: What Next? * index

In Covid-19, a vast number of countries have faced their biggest public health crisis in a century. For many such countries, the pandemic has emerged at a critical juncture following consecutive years of so-called democratic backsliding, where political space has narrowed and fundamental freedoms are under increasing threat. This trend is particularly observable within hybrid regimes under “Strongman” rule. A question posed by the Covid-19 crisis is the extent to which such regimes are taking advantage of the pandemic in order to hastily usher in new restrictions on human rights. Such leaders, it has been claimed, are actively capitalising on the crisis to further cement their rule, and to rapidly stock their arsenals with weapons of “lawfare” to more efficiently quash current or future dissent. A secondary, related question is the extent to which such accusations are being unfairly levelled against leaders of hybrid regimes for taking steps that liberal democracies are also taking without the same level of scrutiny from international observers. After all, the legitimate limitation by states of citizens’ exercise of their rights in times of exception is a norm firmly set out in international law. This article uses a case study of Cambodia, focusing on the impact of its Covid-19 response on the exercise of free expression. Applying the “three-part test,” it analyses whether Cambodia’s response falls within the permissible restrictions on freedom of expression during a time of normalcy (given Cambodia, at the time of writing, has not declared a state of emergency). It then also assesses whether Cambodia’s newly promulgated Emergency Law should be seen as a clear case of a hybrid regime exploiting Covid-19 to hasten restrictions on rights, or whether the criticism levelled against it is excessive, given the constitutional basis for such legislation and the critical nature of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The conventional wisdom among US foreign policymakers is that drones enable precise strikes, and therefore limit collateral damage. In contrast, critics point out that many civilian casualties have ensued, and they variously cite poor intelligence and imprecision of the strikes as reasons for this. Critics have also raised concerns that the US and its allies are engaging in “lawfare” to legitimise violations of human rights law. As such, some have questioned whether academic engagement with the legal questions surrounding targeted killings amount to collusion with state attempts to legitimise human rights violations. This article will argue that by conceptualising the targeted killings programme as a form of state terrorism, we are better equipped to provide a critical analysis of the drones programme within the context of a long history of violence and terrorism which has underpinned the imperial and neo-imperial projects of the UK and US. The article will then argue that there are important similarities between the targeted killings programme, and previous UK and US counterinsurgency operations, including prior uses of air power, and operations involving the internment of terror suspects, and the targeting of specific individuals for interrogation and torture or disappearance. Common to these programmes is that they are forms of policing aimed at crushing rebellions, stifling disorder and constructing or maintaining particular political economies, through terror. Also common to these programmes are the attempts made either to conceal illicit actions, or in the event they are exposed, to shroud them in a veil of legitimacy. The article concludes by offering some brief reflections on why we should not abandon the quest to resolve the thorny legal questions around the targeted killings programme.

The rise to power of champions of post-truth politics attests to a social climate in which facts are devalued while sentiment is given great currency. In this environment, there is cause for concern that both facts and norms will be set aside when yielding unpopular outcomes. Such concerns are especially warranted when it comes to holding state servicemen accountable for alleged violations towards persons affiliated with the adverse party to an armed conflict. Promoting accountability in such cases has always posed a challenge and will likely prove all the more difficult in a state of widespread indifference to the truth. With this threat to the rule of law looming in the background, the article looks to experiences from the Israeli-Palestinian context to draw cautionary lessons and raise a call for vigilance. Through analysis of case studies in which Israeli troops allegedly applied unlawful force against Palestinians, it traces a corrosive process whereby regular recourse to ill-founded and unwarranted denial has undermined the enforcement of international humanitarian law and related rules in the occupied territory. Noting that denial persists even in the wake of seemingly compelling evidence furnished by advancing technologies, the article contends that it has fostered a culture of impunity that in turn threatens to bred widespread disrespect, indifference and alienation towards the law and towards its underlying values. The article ultimately advocates for steps to be taken to offset this dangerous outcome.

In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism—such as torture and extrajudicial executions—that constitute war crimes and can be presented in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. Using Israel as a case study, I investigate the local and global dimensions of the securitization processes, focusing on how different securitizing actors—academics, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, policy makers, and legislators—mobilize the media, shape public opinion, lobby legislators and policy makers, introduce new laws, and pressure donors to pave the way for a form of exceptional intervention to limit the scope of human rights work. Following the dawn of the new millennium, neoconservative forces within liberal democracies have been at the forefront of a campaign against what they call the “politicization of human rights.” This relatively new campaign is intricately linked to the war on terrorism and is part of a backlash against the mounting success of liberal human rights organizations and cause lawyers in subjecting warfare to legal analysis and oversight. The objective of the campaign is to undermine human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have been providing evidence in criminal suits brought against military and government officials in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. In this article, I examine how the term lawfare, which combines the words law and warfare and is defined as the use of law for

RESUMENLa legalización de los asuntos globales se ha considerado positiva, en contraste con las condiciones que precedieron a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Ya no se podían imponer los intereses individuales contra el interés común, ya no existía la coacción y la represión, la toma de decisiones ya no estaba dominada por la política de poder. Se esperaría que el reconocimiento de un ordenamiento jurídico de Derechos Humanos sirviera de garantía para el cumplimiento de los derechos dentro de los Estados. El principal objetivo de este ordenamiento jurídico en su generalidad, que es mejorar el bienestar de la población, no se ha alcanzado en su totalidad, ni ha llegado a todos los países y a todas las personas como se plantea. Por lo tanto, este artículo examina dos factores que podrían confirmar esta afirmación. El primero es la posible ambigüedad del sistema por la debilidad de los instrumentos y sus instituciones. El segundo es el concepto de legitimidad asociado con el lawfare, que permitiría el uso del Derecho Internacional de los Derechos Humanos como estrategia de poder. En este orden de ideas, este artículo está organizado de la siguiente manera: primero, realizamos una división categórica que comienza con una revisión general del sistema internacional de derechos humanos y las relaciones de los actores transnacionales, y luego presentamos varios ejemplos de los instrumentos primarios y sus instituciones asociadas. La segunda categoría discute el concepto de legitimidad asociado a la idea de lawfare, a la luz del Derecho Internacional y las principales teorías de la Cooperación Internacional. Con base en estas ideas teóricas, realizamos un análisis de los casos de tortura en Estados Unidos desde el año 2000. Finalmente, presentamos diversas conclusiones y recomendaciones sobre la estructura y aplicación del sistema en el contexto internacional. ABSTRACTThe legalization of global affairs has been considered positive, in contrast to the conditions preceding the Second World War. No longer could individual interests be imposed against the common interest, no longer was there coercion and repression, no longer was decision making dominated by power politics. It would be expected that the recognition of a Human Rights legal system would serve as a guarantee for the fulfillment of the rights within States. The main objective of this legal system in its generality, which is to improve the well-being of the population, has not been reached in its entirety, nor has it reached all countries and all people as it is posed. Hence, this article examines two factors that could confirm this assertion. The first is the system's possible ambiguity through the weakness of the instruments and their institutions. The second is the concept of legitimacy associated with lawfare, which would allow the use of International Human Rights Law as a power strategy. In this order of ideas, this article is organized as follows: first, we carry out a categorical division that begins with a general review of the international human rights system and the relationships of transnational actors, and we then present various examples of the primary instruments and their associated institutions. The second category discusses the concept of legitimacy associated with the idea of lawfare, in light of International Law and the main theories of International Cooperation. Based on these theoretical ideas, we conducted an analysis of the cases of torture in the United States since the year 2000. Finally, we present various conclusions and recommendations regarding the system's structure and application in the international context. KEY WORDS: Human Rights, international cooperation, torture, political power, norm. JEL CODE /CLASIFICACIÓN JEL: K14, J41 The legalization of global affairs has been considered positive, in contrast to the conditions preceding the Second World War. No longer could individual interests be imposed against the common interest, no longer was there coercion and repression, no longer was decision making dominated by power politics. It would be expected that the recognition of a Human Rights legal system would serve as a guarantee for the fulfillment of the rights within States. The main objective of this legal system in its generality, which is to improve the well-being of the population, has not been reached in its entirety, nor has it reached all countries and all people as it is posed. Hence, this article examines two factors that could confirm this assertion. The first is the system's possible ambiguity through the weakness of the instruments and their institutions. The second is the concept of legitimacy associated with lawfare, which would allow the use of International Human Rights Law as a power strategy. In this order of ideas, this article is organized as follows: first, we carry out a categorical division that begins with a general review of the international human rights system and the relationships of transnational actors, and we then present various examples of the primary instruments and their associated institutions. The second category discusses the concept of legitimacy associated with the idea of lawfare, in light of International Law and the main theories of International Cooperation. Based on these theoretical ideas, we conducted an analysis of the cases of torture in the United States since the year 2000. Finally, we present various conclusions and recommendations regarding the system's structure and application in the international context. KEY WORDS: Human Rights, international cooperation, torture, political power, norm. JEL CODE: K14, J41

This journal is one of the Britain’s leading IR journals, edited by the UK’s most senior and—according to Professor Richard Falk of Princeton—esteemed IR scholar: Prof. Ken Booth. This article (9, 929 words) questions a dominant paradigm that NGOs speak to “truth to power”, and specifically that human rights NGOs, like Human Rights Watch, command the power of transnational legal advocacy. We explore how the IDF as an advanced military power had, over the course of the 2006 Lebanon and the 2009 Gaza Wars, developed capacities of transnational legal advocacy which pushed back public criticism by human rights NGOs, notably as HRW. Further, the article emphasizes how sophisticated states can radically adjust their public relations strategies in light of NGO critiques, and become supported by friendly NGOs, which together turn-the-table of critique upon the conduct of human rights NGOs themselves. A recent publication in Europe’s leading security studies journal, Security Dialogue, referred to the contribution of our article as follows: “(p. 106)…HRW’s attempt to make the IDF accountable for what it alleged to be violations of international humanitarian law during Operation Cast Lead takes place in a complex, discursive and institutional field involving Israeli political and military agencies, UN officials, human rights advocates, and a cluster of non-state organizations advocating in defence of Israel. Vennesson and Rajkovic (2012) have documented at length how this antagonistic transnational field acquired its present shape….” See: William Walters, “Drone strikes, dingpolitik and beyond: Furthering the debate on materiality and security”, 45 Security Dialogue 2 (2014): 101-118.

This article deals with the insidious propaganda campaign against the state of Israel by official and unofficial international organizations, human rights groups, the media and academic institutions, in addition to Palestinian and Arab spokespersons, to challenge the legitimacy of the Jewish state and to demonize it. The campaign is to some extent code for thinly veiled antisemitism, but it also results from a number of factors: admiration of third-worldism and disapproval of democratic systems and values, and adopting as meaningful and relevant to criticism of Israel modern post-modernist thought, cultural relativism and multiculturalism.

The article examines the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the past decade to convince government officials to take meaningful steps towards the eradication of forced labour in Burma. Despite the government's intransigence on this issue, ILO-led interventions have produced some tangible results: a ban on the practice in 2000 and the creation of a complaint mechanism in 2007 that enables its Liaison Officer to determine whether the claims of alleged victims warrant further investigation by the relevant authorities. Critics of the ILO argue that these achievements, although welcome, fail to address the magnitude of the problem. This article details how events at the macro- and micro-levels have affected each other and thus the possibility for further progress on these issues. Special attention is devoted to the coercive use of legal instruments (i.e. lawfare) by both parties and the impact real and threatened actions have had upon their respective goals. The dynamics provi...

In an attempt to impose limits on the level of acceptable incidental civilian suffering during armed conflict, international humanitarian law (IHL) articulates a proportionality formula as the test to determine whether or not an attack is lawful. Efforts to comply with that formula during the conduct of hostilities can involve a host of legal and operational challenges. These challenges have inspired a growing body of doctrinal and empirical research. A recent international conference in Jerusalem, co-sponsored by the Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Israel and the Occupied Territories and the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, brought together human rights lawyers, military experts and scholars from a variety of disciplines to assess recent developments relating to the proportionality principle in international humanitarian law. This report examines ten conference presentations which offer important insights into: the nature, scope of application and operational requirements of the proportionality principle under IHL; the modalities of investigation and review of proportionality decisions; and the challenges involved in proportionality decision-making.

The mass media, personal smartphone and social media facilities and legal and litigation fora, taken together, create the spotlight under which modern warfare is frequently fought and that spotlight is the focus of Chap. 11. After explaining the current law as it applies, respectively, to war correspondents and to journalists, the chapter looks at the diverse media, at attempts to control it and assesses the implications of human rights law norms. Noting the potential strategic impact of news media and private reporting of events, new trends are identified. Legal processes contribute to the spotlight, and the chapter reviews in this regard Coroners’ courts, inquiries, criminal courts, judicial review, human rights proceedings and challenges at the political level and proceedings before international courts and tribunals. The strategically important implications of ‘lawfare in the digital age’ are then assessed, and an attempt is made to draw some conclusions.

The Texaco oil company has long been accused of creating an environmental and human rights catastrophe while conducting oil operations in the Ecuadorian Amazon over a number of decades to 1990. Plaintiffs from the area, largely Indigenous people, have sought compensation via litigation for nearly twenty years, first against Texaco, then against the merged successor company ChevronTexaco (now known as ‘Chevron’). This article tells the tale (so far) of that litigation, which has wound its way from the United States to Ecuador and back again. The plaintiffs won a US$18 billion judgment in Ecuador in early 2011, though an appeal is pending. Furthermore, related litigation remains ongoing in the US as well as in the Hague in the Netherlands. This story of protracted and ongoing ‘lawfare’ reveals just how difficult it can be to hold major multinational corporations accountable for environmental and human rights harms when those harms have taken place in a weak developing State in a virtual regulatory vacuum.

This chapter examines how Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations use international law differently in the course of their advocacy: Palestinian human rights organizations use international law as a form of nonviolent resistance against Israeli occupation, while Israeli human rights organizations focus their efforts on strengthening Israeli democracy by encouraging government accountability to human rights principles, including state adherence to international human rights norms. Both Palestinian and Israeli (and international) human rights and humanitarian organizations have been criticized by some members of the Israeli government and its supporters, however, for this advocacy, with their work seen as a form of anti-Semitism, as “lawfare”1, or as supportive of terrorism.2

This chapter focuses on the normalization of lawfare, a process whereby war has become less an exception than the rule and, therefore, is as much a strategic operation as a legal one. I chart how the cozy alliance of humanitarians, human rights defenders, and military lawyers could determine and police the limits of concepts of humanity. Through a critical engagement of Samuel Huntington and the war on terror, I focus on how civilizational and cultural discourses can facilitate this policing process, ultimately adjudicating which humans will be granted human rights and which can be killed with impunity.

Drawing on this analysis, the conclusion will flag some pressing threats posed by Israel’s identification of the international legal framework as a battleground of the future. In particular, it will demonstrate that Israel, by seeking to have international humanitarian law adapted so as to exclude its full application to the types of conflict such as those against Hizbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008-9, is seeking to promote a narrative closer to the 19th Century colonial narrative from which humanitarian law first emerged. By this reading, Palestinians, by virtue of their statelessness and lack of civilization, are not due the protections offered by international law, for to do so would be to sabotage the western liberal project by extending it to an illegitimate actor from whom one can expect neither reciprocity nor reason.

The use of courts to prosecute violations of human rights has grown exponentially since the 1990s. This growth has coincided with the vast accumulation of power by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the expansion of the concept of “universal jurisdiction.” NGOs claiming to promote human rights (many funded by European governments, the EU, and prominent foundations like the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Institute) are engaged in international lobbying as well as filing civil lawsuits or initiating criminal complaints against Israeli officials for alleged “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” in Belgium, England, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and elsewhere. These legal actions, ostensibly to provide “justice” to “victims,” are a form of “lawfare” – a “strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve military objectives” – intended to punish Israel or anti-terror operations, as well as to block future actions. They are also a means for actors that are not accountable to any form of democratic check to subvert a country’s foreign policy and interfere with diplomatic relations. While Israel is not the only country that has been subject to NGO lawfare (several prominent NGOs have filed similar suits against US officials in France and Germany), it is a primary target of these efforts. Though claiming to promote universal human rights, these same NGOs havenot pursued cases against Palestinian, Hezbollah, Syrian, or Iranian officials involved in terror. The strategy to delegitimize Israel using legal frameworks was adopted at the NGO Forum of the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa (“WCAR” or “Durban Conference”). The NGO Forum crystallized a plan in which Israel would be singled out as a “racist” and “apartheid” state and isolated internationally through a campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions and explicitly adopted lawfare to advance the political war against Israel.ii The NGO Forum Declaration called for the “adoption of all measures to ensure [the] enforcement” of international humanitarian law, including “the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to investigate and bring to justice those who may be guilty of war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the crime of Apartheid...perpetrated in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” This movement is led by Palestinian NGOs such as Al Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), and Badil, and aided by international NGOs including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Federation of Human Rights (France), and the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York). These NGOs are largely supported by European governments and receive funding from prominent foundations. This monograph presents a number of case studies analyzing the central role that NGOs have played in the strategy of lawfare, using it to further their political campaign against Israel. The study begins with a discussion of NGO involvement in the movement to promote and expand the concept of universal jurisdiction and thecreation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Without these legal developments, this NGO strategy would not be possible. Second, the paper will detail anti-Israel lawfare at the international level, examining the crystallization of the tactic at the NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban Conference, alternative strategies adopted by the NGO network in lieu of criminal prosecutions of Israelis at the ICC, and the International Court of Justice case against Israel’s security barrier. As in other politicized NGO campaigns, these activities consistently draw an immoral equivalence between anti-terror operations and mass scale atrocities, minimize or omit the context of terror, exploit international legal terminology and rhetoric, level condemnations without providing proper bases or reliable evidence, and use incomplete, distorted, or inconsistent legal definitions. Third, the monograph discusses NGO-led litigation against Israel in the national courts of Europe and the United States. Because Israel has not ratified its participation in the International Criminal Court (ICC) due to serious political and legal concerns, NGO lawfare has generally been pursued in national courts where “war crimes” statutes or other universal jurisdiction laws have been enacted. The lawsuits detailed in the study include the case against Ariel Sharon in Belgium for his alleged responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the arrest warrant issued against Doron Almog in the United Kingdom for alleged “grave breaches” of the Geneva Convention; civil cases in the US against Avi Dichter for his alleged role in the targeted killing of the founder of Hamas’ military wing and against Moshe Ya’alon for his alleged participation in the 1996 IDF operation in Qana, Lebanon; and, finally, cases initiated in the US and the UK intended to block corporate trade with Israel. As a US Court of Appeals observed, these cases seek to engage courts “in the micro-management of military targeting decisions” and are not cases such as those against “an Idi Amin or a Mao Zedong.” Plaintiffs point to cases where “similar high-level decisions on military tactics and strategy during a modern military operation have been held to constitute torture or extrajudicial killing under international law.” While these cases were all dismissed in the preliminary stages, the media coverage was highly damaging, fulfilling one of the NGOs’ central goals. As a result of these cases, several countries, notably Belgium and the UK, have amended their laws to preventfuture abuse. Such amendments have included denyingNGOs the ability to apply to a judge directly for an arrest warrant without consulting any government officials. Yet, these lawsuits continue to have serious political and diplomatic repercussions, including severely limiting the ability of Israeli officials to travel abroad. And the media impact remains an important element in the demonization of Israel. This report also highlights the lack of transparency and accountability of NGOs, and their contribution todiplomatic and political tension, and even greater conflict. Analysts have noted that the “single-issue” focus of many NGOs that claim to promote human rights makes them “less concerned with the balancing of interests required of policy leaders.” NGO officials use lawsuits to promote their personal ideologies and foreign policy goals, and are not accountable to a democratic polity. Instead of engaging in debate and making the difficult choices of nation-states,such as how to weigh sovereignty and security concerns with human rights, these NGOs advance their political agenda regardless of the wider impact of their actions. This self-interested view in the midst of a complex geopolitical environment, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, entrenches conflict, and paradoxically, leads to a dilution of the universality of human rights.