As the joint US-UK occupation of Iraq formally ended in June 2004 the British forces in Iraq switched from rules of engagement based on the laws of war to narrow rules of self-defence. Three months later the rules were changed back again as, when following them, the British forces were unable to cope with the levels of armed violence they faced. Despite this, the British Government continued to characterise killings of Iraqi insurgents as being made in selfdefence. This created uncertainty for the British forces when using lethal force in operations and afterwards when their conduct was subjected to legal scrutiny. How and why did the British Government get into this position? By examining international law and military operations from the 1860s to the Iraq War, the thesis shows that the rules were a product of underlying legal paradigms of armed conflict and law-enforcement created after the Second World War. The British Government and others treated these paradigms as separate, divided by a threshold of violence, but this does not reflect how force is used in military operations in practice nor in all circumstances as a matter of law. It is possible instead to understand the paradigms as overlapping to accommodate different levels of violence and the area of overlap as represented by an unused exception to the right to life to quell an insurrection contained in the European Convention on Human Rights. Treating them as separate can then be seen as a political 2 choice - a choice that attempts to deny recognition to armed groups, but which can lead to the sort of muddle seen in Iraq: military muddle leading to an inability to maintain control and legal muddle over how to justify the use of lethal force. The development of the legal paradigms can also be seen as contingent. It has been shaped by the political and strategic choices made by States in the characterisation of conflicts and the laws which they have sought to apply to reflect their own interests and the conduct of their operations, the influence of other agents, and by the circumstances of the time.
A penumbra of war: the use of lethal force in British military operations in internal armed conflicts
Bicknell, D. (Author). 1 Feb 2021
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy