Latest in Detention: Operations in Afghanistan
[The post below is the latest installment of the joint blog series arising from the 2016 Transatlantic Dialogue on International Law and Armed Conflict.
Interested in the ongoing debate over the relationship between LOAC and Human Rights Law in general, or the intersection of those bodies of law in relation to non-criminal detention in particular? You won't want to miss this.
In 2012, the UN Human Rights Council asked the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to produce a document spelling out just what it means to say there is a prohibition on arbitrary detention--including in the context of armed conflict.
Polarization surrounding the SSCI Report (see here for Lawfare’s coverage) has been most pronounced on the efficacy of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). The Report and its supporters have proclaimed that EITs never produce useful information. Unfortunately, that pat assertion undermines the possibility of a consensus on future interrogation tactics, including a consensus that rules out coercion.
The news comes from Time:
The United States Department of Defense said Thursday that it had shuttered the last American detention facility in Afghanistan, bringing to an end a controversial practice of holding prisoners in the country without trial.
Below, you will find the second installment in our ongoing effort to identify, in summary form, key areas of dispute as between the SSCI, the SSCI minority, and the CIA with regard the CIA's detention and interrogation program.
As Professors Ryan Goodman and David Bosco have both noted in excellent posts at Just Security and Foreign Policy, respectively, over the past seven years, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Prosecutor has quietly but persistently advanced a “preliminary examination” of the conflict in Afghanistan. Although it has been cl
Last week, a British court allowed civil tort claims against the British government to proceed. In Rahmatullah v. Ministry of Defence, the High Court (Queen’s Bench Division) held that a former Pakistani detainee—captured by the United Kingdom but then transferred to American custody—was not barred from suing by either the state immunity or the foreign act of state doctrines.
A very interesting development today with respect to the ongoing effort to complete the shut-down of US-administered military detention in Afghanistan:
As you may recall, we have long since ceased holding any Afghans in military detention in Afghanistan, but we have maintained a rump population of non-Afghan detainees in our control.
Or so I gather from this Washington Post piece, which opens thusly:
A Russian captured fighting with insurgents in Afghanistan and held for years at a detention facility near Bagram air base will be flown to the United States to be prosecuted in federal court, according to U.S.
Over at Newsweek, Jeff Stein wonders: "What Will U.S. Forces Do With ISIS Prisoners?"
Among the many unresolved issues in the campaign to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, as it’s generally known, is what to do with prisoners in Iraq or Syria, should American special operators or U.S.-backed forces be lucky enough to capture any. How deeply will we be involved in interrogating them?