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Matthew Happold

Precise statistics are impossible to come by, but more than 300,000 children are believed to be serving as soldiers in conflicts across the world today. Child soldiers have served in conflicts in Africa, Asia and South and Central America. If the statistics are accurate, the recruitment of children is growing. These statistics conceal considerable differences in the experiences of child soldiers, differences that are concealed by the stereotyped view of the child soldier as a pre-adolescent African boy toting an AK-47. Unable to conscript, as conscription is a governmental prerogative, insurgent groups frequently resort to forced recruitment to alleviate manpower shortages. There is a tendency to categorise children's motives for volunteering as permissible or impermissible depending on whether the observer agrees with them or not. International concern has concentrated on the recruitment and use of child soldiers in times of war. Yet many children serve in armed forces in peacetime.

in Child soldiers in international law
Changing perceptions
Matthew Happold

Perceptions of childhood vary across time and space. One criticism that can be made about viewing the issue through a children's rights prism, however, is that it obscures the fact that children and adults frequently face the same pressures and act for the same reasons. Appreciating that conceptions of childhood have differed across time and space helps us understand why child soldiers continue to be recruited and how child soldiers themselves might view their experiences. The idea that children have rights, and that those rights operate to oblige their parents and other adults to do or refrain from doing certain things to them, is new. Nevertheless, it is argued that it is an idea whose time has come. With regard to younger children, the argument that their development right not to be recruited trumps their autonomy right to make their own decisions seems much simpler.

in Child soldiers in international law
Stephen C. Neff

Neutrality did more than merely survive the creation of the League. It even experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the most striking failure of the League system: the unsuccessful attempt to stop the Italian conquest of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1936, by imposing economic sanctions against Italy. This humiliating failure led many to conclude that the collective-security apparatus was too weak to rely on in a crisis. There was general agreement too that neutrality was not abolished by the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War of 1928. One regional codification effort should be noted: the Pan-American Convention on Maritime Neutrality of 1928. The 'new neutrality' group disagreed with its community-interest rival in not being hostile to the very concept of neutrality per se. Neutral solidarity, in the spirit of the Spanish Civil War, was one of the most striking features of World War II.

in The rights and duties of neutrals
Tarcisio Gazzini

This chapter describes the collective security system as envisaged in the United Nations Charter. It begins with some basic considerations on the pivotal role of Art. 39 of the Charter. Next, the chapter deals with the legal basis of the Security Council's powers and the conditions under which such powers can be exercised. These powers are then analysed following the two-fold distinction between non-military and military measures. The power to impose the adoption of economic enforcement measures necessarily presupposes the power to make these measures permitted, had they been otherwise contrary to international law. The chapter focuses on the legal effects of the Security Council's resolutions. It concludes with a discussion on the limits to the Security Council's powers and the remedies against their violations.

in The changing rules on the use of force in international law
Tarcisio Gazzini

This chapter discusses the extent to which the collective security system established in the United Nations Charter could function in the 1990s in spite of the non-implementation of Arts. 43 et seq. of the Charter. The enlargement of the notion of threat to international peace, already noticeable in 1992, is one of the most striking features of the Security Council's recent practice. The prevailing and more convincing view admits that the Security Council may overcome the non-implementation of Art. 43 through the conclusion of ad hoc agreements with Member States. The main lesson learned from the United Nations' recent practice is that peace-keeping and peace-enforcement are mutually exclusive options. The authorisation practice constitutes the Security Council's attempt to over-come the non-implementation of Art. 43 of the Charter as an alternative to enforcement measures put at the disposal of the United Nations by Member States on an ad hoc basis.

in The changing rules on the use of force in international law
Abstract only
Tarcisio Gazzini
in The changing rules on the use of force in international law
Abstract only
Stephen C. Neff

The 'Partnership for Peace' programme of the NATO alliance embraces such traditionally neutral countries as Sweden and Switzerland. Historical perspective, however, must lead to instant suspicions of any claims of the death of neutrality. The period from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth has witnessed, overall, an advance of the position of belligerents at the expense of that of neutrals. The world may be entering a period somewhat like the early and mid-nineteenth century, in which the absence of protracted great-power warfare led to a general belief that the balance of legal power was swinging in favour of neutrals and against belligerents. That hope on the part of champions of neutral rights proved misplaced at that time. And it could very easily prove misplaced again now.

in The rights and duties of neutrals
Stephen C. Neff

Throughout the nineteenth century, the code-of-conduct school of thought would have the doctrinal field largely to itself. But it continued to be a broad church, with the split between the deductive wing and the pragmatic line remaining very much in evidence. It was, accordingly, an age of diversity within this framework. More significant, though, was the fact that state practice was pushing the law in the direction of a certain uniformity, with a broad consensus for redressing the juridical 'balance of power' more in favour of the rights of neutrals than of belligerents. The high point of this trend was the adoption of the Declaration of Paris in 1856, when the world definitively resolved that the 'free ships-free goods' principle should become a rule of general law. In the nineteenth century, practice rather than theory continued to play the leading role in the evolution of the law of neutrality generally.

in The rights and duties of neutrals
Abstract only
Stephen C. Neff

As a herald of ever-advancing rights for neutrals, the Declaration of Paris proved to be a false dawn. The Declaration of Paris contained two explicit exceptions to the rule: contraband and blockade. To states which were mindful that total war might one day return to the international scene, the most important of all the exceptions to the 'free ships-free goods' principle was the belligerent right of blockade. There were some marginal cases in which belligerents made use of sovereign rights to further their ends instead of belligerents' rights properly speaking. In light of the various belligerent innovations of the late nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising that supporters of neutral rights became increasingly worried about how scrupulously the rights of neutrals, or whatever remained of them, would be observed in a future great-power conflict.

in The rights and duties of neutrals
Nikolaos K. Tsagourias

This chapter explains the structure and nature of international law and its inherent tensions in order to transform it. It then describes the contradictions of the legal reasoning concerning humanitarian intervention. The chapter considers the source of the inherent contradictions between 'mechanically applicable rules' and 'situation-sensitive, ad hoc standards', which evolves into that between individualism and altruism, culminating in liberalism and communitarism. For Critical Lawyers, individual freedom and communal restraint are viewed with equal suspicion and considered to be diametrically opposed. Critical Lawyers criticise the traditional approach of defining modernity with sovereignty and history and also criticise the traditional scholarship for revering the past. Today the state encounters multiple demands and faces the forces of globalisation but also fragmentation. The reification of sovereignty as it is mirrored in international rules obscures the essence of these changes.

in Jurisprudence of international law