1. PARTICIPATION IN A NON-INTERNATIONAL ARMED CONFLICT: A FAILED ANALOGY WITH CO-BELLIGERENCY.
- Author
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Lesaffre, Pauline
- Subjects
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HUMANITARIAN law , *BELLIGERENCY , *WAR (International law) , *INTERNATIONAL law - Abstract
Foreign interventions in support of a belligerent party to an existing noninternational armed conflict ("NIAC") increased tremendously since the beginning of this century. This common practice evidences a pressing need to clarify, or determine, if and how International Humanitarian Law ("IHL") regulates these foreign interventions in favor of a belligerent party to a specific NIAC. Among others, one issue for IHL consists in establishing when the intervening actor becomes a belligerent party to a NIAC, i.e., to a separate and distinct NIAC or to the same existing NIAC, and therefore when this actor must respect the law of NIAC. This article demonstrates that the law of NIAC does not regulate this issue yet. However, it emphasizes that State practice and International Criminal Court case law (as well as scholarly works) suggest that the intervening actor becomes a belligerent party to the same pre-existing NIAC (one single NIAC) rather than to a distinct NIAC (multiple NIACs--one additional NIAC for each foreign intervention). This said, State practice (except for U.S. practice) and case law does not define the conditions for the intervening actor to become such a party to a pre-existing NIAC. Thus, this article contributes to the discussion about these conditions, granted that the law of NIAC will certainly accept the suggestion from practice of a single NIAC. This article proposes a method of analogical reasoning to establish these conditions and discards the analogy with co-belligerency which is suggested by U.S. practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023