The methods used in the book – including the approaches to treaty interpretation and the approach to sources (customary international law and general principles of law) – are explained here. Then, the concept which constitutes the bedrock of this book (i.e. ‘normative avoidance’) is explained, as well as its characteristics and consequences (i.e. the absence of prohibition or authorisation, as a result of State will).
Opinio juris ‘means that the practice in question must be undertaken with a sense of legal right or obligation’. If legislation pertaining to intelligence collection is certainly established with ‘a sense of legal right’, this chapter doubts that the implementation of this legislation – i.e., by carrying out espionage or cyber-espionage activities – is carried out with the same ‘sense of legal right’. It means that the existence of opinio juris – whether in terms of authorisation or prohibition – cannot be proved in that respect.
This chapter is conceived as a first step in the identification of specific customary rules on cyber-espionage. In fact, the ILC made clear that ‘legislative acts’ and ‘executive conduct’ had to be considered as part of State practice in this context. It explores the national laws that exist in the field of espionage and cyber-espionage, and underlines that States usually prohibit espionage against their own interests, but authorise their own espionage activities abroad. It also analyses the grounds allowing intelligence collection, and notes that – more often than not – they are not limited to the protection of national security, but also include the economic well-being of a country. Then, a challenge to executive conduct – i.e., spying activities themselves – resides in the fact that they are usually performed in secret. It is however admitted that practice must be public (or at least known to the ‘victim State’), which means that clandestine examples of executive conduct cannot be taken into account in the assessment of customary international law. The admissible examples of State practice then exclusively reside in legislative acts, which were analysed in the previous chapter. This means that only the normative power of States – i.e., the possibility to adopt laws that authorise intelligence activities abroad, but prohibit espionage directed at their own interests – may count as State practice. In contrast, the clandestine implementation of these laws – which is materialised into executive conduct and espionage activities – is not admissible.
This chapter demonstrates that cyber-espionage does not breach sovereignty. First, it argues that digital intrusions are not similar to physical trespass and – as espionage per se is not an international wrongful act – cyber-espionage does not breach international law either. Second, it disagrees with a view which gained support over the last years, and according to which damage should be taken into account to determine whether a breach of sovereignty occurred. In fact, damage is irrelevant in assessing whether a breach of sovereignty occurred, and the contrary view does not find satisfactory support in State practice. Even if this view was valid, cyber-espionage would not breach sovereignty, as it results in minimal effects. Several case studies are included.
In 2004, the remains of two First World War US soldiers from France were delivered to the US Government for identification and burial. One set of remains was identified and buried, and the other went into a cold-case status. In 2019, the second individual was identified using multiple lines of evidence. The possible individuals that could be associated with the remains were reduced based on material evidence recovered with the remains and the spatiotemporal historical context of the remains. The First World War personnel records then offered sufficient biometric criteria to narrow the possible individuals associated with the second recovered individual to one person, Pfc. Charles McAllister. A family reference DNA sample from a direct matrilineal descendant of the individual added statistical weight to the identification, although the mtDNA was not a decisive or necessary factor in the identification. Due to bureaucratic reasons, the legal identification of Pfc. Charles McAllister is still pending.
The extremely high death rates in northern Italy during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic called for exceptional rules and suspension of funeral practices and burial rites. Additionally, forms of collective burial, typical of a wartime scenario, and mechanical methods and timing were reintroduced into the handling of corpses. Although several academic studies have highlighted how the absence of funeral ceremonies and ‘dignified burials’ has caused prolonged and deep suffering for the mourners and for many of the caregivers and health workers, few have so far focused on funeral workers. This article focuses on the intimate, emotional and ethical experiences of a group of funeral workers in northern Italy who handled COVID corpses and had to take the place of the mourners at the time of burial. Through an anthropological analysis of their oral memories, this work attempts to analyse their expressions of discomfort, frustration, fear and suffering.
Since the sixteenth century, artistic anatomy – a branch of medical science subordinated to the Fine Arts – has understood itself as a comparative investigation halfway between forensic dissection and the analysis of classical art and live bodies. Its teaching was first instituted in Italy by the 1802 curriculum of the national Fine Arts academies, but underwent a drastic transformation at the turn of the century, as the rise of photography brought about both a new aesthetics of vision and an increase in the precision of iconographic documentation. In this article I will attempt to provide a history of the teaching of this discipline at the close of the nineteenth century within the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, with a focus on its ties to contemporary French practices. Drawing on archival materials including lesson plans, letters and notes from the classes of the three medical doctors who subsequently held the chair (Gaetano Strambio, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti and Carlo Biaggi), I will argue that the deep connections between their teaching of the discipline and their work at the city hospital reveal a hybrid approach, with the modern drive towards live-body study unable to wholly supplant the central role still granted to corpses in the grammar of the visual arts.
Osteological collections are key sources of information in providing crucial insight into the lifestyles of past populations. In this article, we conduct an osteobiographical assessment of the human remains of fourteen Selk'nam individuals, which are now housed in the Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria. The aim is to bring these individuals closer to their communities of origin by using non-invasive methods aimed at rebuilding their biological profiles (i.e., age-at-death, biological sex and health status), adding to these with results from provenance research. This way, the human remains were assigned a new identity closer to their original one, through a process that we call ‘re-individualisation’. This is especially significant since it must be assumed that the individuals were exhumed against their cultural belief system. We conclude that building strong and long-lasting collaborations between Indigenous representatives and biological anthropologists has a pivotal role in research for reappraising Indigenous history.