Fighting an Illegal War and Fighting a War Illegally: the Link between Regime Change Operations and International Humanitarian Law Violations

(Gabor Rona – Just Security) When States go to war to replace an enemy’s very system of government, the goals of the military campaign can lead to noncompliance with the rules that regulate belligerents during armed conflict. The end result threatens not only international law prohibiting the resort to war except under very specific circumstances, but also international humanitarian law that protects civilians in wartime. Experts writing on these pages, and elsewhere, have almost unanimously declared the recent uses of force by the United States in Venezuela and by the United States and Israel in Iran to be violations of international law. Some, such as Oona Hathaway, have noted, correctly, that States increasingly violate the prohibition of the use of force, or excuse such violations by other States. Some scholars condemn these violations and call for accountability. Others, such as Yuval Shany and Amichai Cohen, as well as Ken Watkin, argue for relaxation of the rules to better reflect States’ perceived security interests, but they fail to offer a convincing roadmap for doing so without creating a permission structure for exactly what the law is meant to accomplish: the prohibition of naked acts of aggression, such as those committed by Russia in Ukraine (a response to Shany and Cohen from Rebecca Hamilton and Tom Dannenbaum can be found here). Meanwhile, little has been said about the effect of the illegality of the resort to force on compliance with the rules for conduct of the armed conflicts triggered thereby. – Fighting an Illegal War and Fighting a War Illegally