The role of necessity in international humanitarian and human rights law

The nature of armed conflict has changed dramatically in recent decades. In particular, it is increasingly the case that hostilities now occur alongside ‘everyday’ situations. This has led to a pressing need to determine when a ‘conduct of hostilities’ model (governed by international humanitarian law—IHL) applies and when a ‘law enforcement’ model (governed by international human rights law—IHRL) applies. This in turn raises the question of whether these two legal regimes are incompatible or whether they might be applied in parallel. It is on this question that the current paper focuses, examining it at the level of principle. Whilst most accounts of the principles underlying these two areas of law focus on humanitarian considerations, few have compared the role played by necessity in each. This paper seeks to address this omission. It demonstrates that considerations of necessity play a prominent role in both IHL and IHRL, albeit with differing consequences. It then applies this necessity-based analysis to suggest a principled basis for rationalising the relationship between IHL and IHRL, demonstrating how this approach would operate in practice. It is shown that, by emphasising the role of necessity in IHL and IHRL, an approach can be adopted that reconciles the two in a manner that is sympathetic to their object and purpose.

The Lieber Code and the regulation of civil war in international law

In this paper, we consider one particularly interesting feature of the Lieber Code, which is the fact that it was drawn up by the U.S. Government to regulate the conduct of its armed forces in a civil war. In so doing, we hope to explore the extent to which there may be links between the Lieber Code and the contemporary regulation of non-international armed conflicts. In particular, we explore some similarities and contrasts between the views on the regulation of civil war that existed at the time of the drafting of the Lieber Code and the position that exists today.

The trees and the bees: using enforcement and income projects to protect forests and rural livelihoods through spatial joint production

Forest managers in developing countries enforce extraction restrictions to limit forest degradation. In response, villagers may displace some of their extraction to other forests, which generates “leakage” of degradation. Managers also implement poverty alleviation projects to compensate for lost resource access or to induce conservation. We develop a model of spatial joint production of bees and fuelwood that is based on forest-compatible projects such as beekeeping in Thailand, Tanzania, and Mexico. We demonstrate that managers can better determine the amount and pattern of degradation by choosing the location of both enforcement and the forest-based activity.

A rate and state friction law for saline ice

Sea ice friction models are necessary to predict the nature of interactions between sea ice floes. These interactions are of interest on a range of scales, for example, to predict loads on engineering structures in icy waters or to understand the basin-scale motion of sea ice. Many models use Amonton's friction law due to its simplicity. More advanced models allow for hydrodynamic lubrication and refreezing of asperities; however, modeling these processes leads to greatly increased complexity. In this paper we propose, by analogy with rock physics, that a rate- and state-dependent friction law allows us to incorporate memory (and thus the effects of lubrication and bonding) into ice friction models without a great increase in complexity. We support this proposal with experimental data on both the laboratory (∼0.1 m) and ice tank (∼1 m) scale. These experiments show that the effects of static contact under normal load can be incorporated into a friction model. We find the parameters for a first-order rate and state model to be A = 0.310, B = 0.382, and μ0 = 0.872. Such a model then allows us to make predictions about the nature of memory effects in moving ice-ice contacts.