The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provide authoritative guidance for states and businesses on how to prevent and address business-related human rights harms, including in conflict-affected areas. States need to explore a more innovative range of policy and regulatory options in such situations, whether they are engaging with cooperating companies or dealing with uncooperative ones. Companies need to be able to know and show that they can operate with integrity – and avoid being involved in gross abuses of human rights – and that their risk assessment, mitigation, and remediation processes take full account of the potential risks to affected stakeholders, not just risks to the business.

Attacking from a distance is nothing new, but with the advent of certain new technologies, attacks can be undertaken in which the attacker remains very remote from the scene where force will be employed. This article analyses the legal issues raised by attacks employing, respectively, remotely piloted vehicles, autonomous attack technologies, and cyber capabilities. It considers targeting law principles and rules, including distinction, discrimination, proportionality, and the precautions rules, observes that they all apply to remote attack and proceeds to explore the challenges that arise from implementing the legal requirements. Due note is taken of states’ legal obligation to review new weapons, methods and means of warfare, an obligation that reinforces the view that existing law will provide the prism through which these new attack technologies must be evaluated by states. The article then discusses how notions of liability apply in relation to remote attack, and considers whether it is depersonalization rather than remoteness in attack that is the critical legal issue.

Advances in the law of Geneva and the law of The Hague did not remain a dead letter during the World War I, but this was essentially with regard to the wounded and prisoners of war. Those categories of persons were better protected than civilians by treaty-based humanitarian law, which was still in its infancy. Although the ideal of humanity was realized on a large scale thanks to the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and myriad other charitable, denominational, or non-denominational organizations, none of the belligerents hesitated to infringe and violate the law whenever they could. The various occupied populations, on the Western and Eastern fronts and in the Balkans, served as their guinea pigs and were their perfect victims.

International humanitarian law (IHL) does not provide a precise definition of the notion of occupation, nor does it propose clear-cut standards for determining when an occupation starts and when its ends. This article analyses in detail the notion of occupation under IHL and its constitutive elements, and sets out a legal test for identifying when a situation qualifies as an occupation for the purposes of IHL. It concludes by suggesting an adjustment of the legal test to the specific characteristics of occupation by proxy and occupation by multinational forces.

In the wake of the mandate of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights (SRSG), international criminal law looks set to play a role in measures towards the legal accountability of business actors involved in gross human rights and humanitarian law violations. Against the backdrop of the SRSG's now completed mandate, this article looks at three recent developments in international criminal law to consider the field's potential relevance to business actors involved in conflict. The first is the newest mode of liability recently adopted by the International Criminal Court, indirect perpetration through an organisation. The second is the aiding and abetting doctrine as applied by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Charles Taylor case. The third is the potential uptake of a practice of thematic prosecutions focusing on particular under-regulated issues of concern for the international community.

Armed drones pose a major threat to the general prohibition on the inter-state use of force and to respect for human rights. On the battlefield, in a situation of armed conflict, the use of armed drones may be able to satisfy the fundamental international humanitarian law rules of distinction and proportionality (although attributing international criminal responsibility for their unlawful use may prove a significant challenge). Away from the battlefield, the use of drone strikes will often amount to a violation of fundamental human rights. Greater clarity on the applicable legal regime along with restraints to prevent the further proliferation of drone technology are urgently needed.

This article reconsiders the status and legality of both autonomous and remote weapons systems under international humanitarian law. Technologically advanced unmanned military systems are being introduced into the modern battlespace with insufficient recognition of their potential challenge to international humanitarian law. The article questions the understanding of both autonomous and remote weapons systems as ‘weapons’ and seeks to consider how their use may impact existing legal categories. Their use is then specifically situated to consider the legality of their deployment in certain contexts. Finally, the article raises the question of impunity for the use of both autonomous and remote weapons systems that arise from the inability to attribute responsibility for the harm they cause. It is imperative that law and policy are developed to govern the development and deployment of these advanced weapons systems to forestall these likely situations of impunity.

For a number of reasons, questions regarding the accountability of corporations for actions that might be complicit in the commission of international crimes have gained prominence in recent times. Though initiatives regarding what is more broadly described as business and human rights are to be welcomed, this sometimes distracts from existing systems of accountability, especially when those acts, which may be discussed as human rights violations, equally constitute crimes. Whilst not all criminal jurisdictions extend to legal persons, the Norwegian Penal Code does. This article analyses the Norwegian Penal Code's provisions, in light of amendments made to it in 2008 to include international crimes in it, with the effect of extending those crimes to corporations. The article first addresses the personal, material, temporal, and geographical scope of the penal code. It then addresses the potential consequence of the exercise of jurisdiction in light of the only case in recent times in Norway that deals explicitly with a corporation's potential criminal liability for war crimes. The article then addresses three additional issues with respect to provisions on complicity, intent, and defences under the Norwegian Penal Code, before concluding with some reflections on the possible future effects of this legislation and the possibility that it will inspire developments elsewhere.

The article deals with the effect of the time factor in the application of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) in ‘prolonged belligerent occupations’. It demonstrates that IHL applies in its entirety to such situations and that the adjustments necessary can be made through the interpretation of existing IHL norms. As for IHRL, the protracted character of an occupation reinforces the importance of respecting and applying human rights. It cannot, however, be invoked in order to influence the interpretation of the notion of a state of emergency leading to the adoption of derogations from IHRL rules.

The introduction of nanotechnology into our civil life and warfare is expected to influence the application and interpretation of the existing rules of international humanitarian law. This article examines the challenges posed to international humanitarian law by the widespread use of nanotechnology in light of four basic rules of international humanitarian law: (1) the obligation to ensure the legality of weapons; (2) distinction; (3) proportionality; and (4) precaution. It concludes by identifying three areas of concern, which arise from widespread use of nanotechnology, for the application of international humanitarian law.

Since the 1967 War, in the course of which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the Supreme Court of Israel has considered thousands of petitions relating to acts of the military and other authorities in those territories (OT). This article reviews the contribution to the law of belligerent occupation of the Court's jurisprudence in these cases. After discussing issues of jurisdiction and the applicable norms, the article reviews the way in which the Court has interpreted military needs, the welfare of the local population, changes in the local law, and use of resources; the attitude of the Court to the long-term nature of the occupation and the existence of Israeli settlements, settlers, and commuters in the OT; the introduction of a three-pronged test of proportionality in assessing military necessity; and hostilities in occupied territories. In the final section, I draw some general conclusions on the Court's contribution to the law of occupation.

Growing reliance on ‘multi-stakeholder initiatives’ (MSIs) aimed at improving business performance with respect to specific human rights-related challenges has become a significant dimension of the evolving corporate responsibility agenda over recent decades. A number of such initiatives have developed in direct response to calls for greater state and corporate accountability in areas of weak governance and violent conflict. This article examines the evolution of key MSIs in light of the 2011 adoption of the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and addresses challenges facing these initiatives in the future.

Over the past forty years, there has been a steady rise in the expectation for companies to operate as responsible citizens. Today companies have at their disposal a variety of initiatives, and new levels of accountability have been reached with the advancement of international standards on, among others, corporate responsibility to respect human rights. Against this background, this article provides an overview of the most important guiding tools available on this subject and on how to promote peace and stability when operating in conflict-affected or high-risk areas. The article argues that ongoing stakeholder engagement is a key success factor in meeting the responsibility to respect human rights and that it has to be an integral part of a company's strategy, especially when operating in conflict-affected countries.

In the last decade considerable expense has been invested in non-lethal weapons development programmes, including by the United States military and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and members of the European Working Group Non-Lethal Weapons. This paper acknowledges the potential suitability of non-lethal weapons for specific situations arising on the battlefield, but cautions against those who advocate for any weakening of existing international humanitarian law frameworks to provide for greater employment of non-lethal technologies.

The 2003 occupation of Iraq ignited an important debate among scholars over the merits of transformative occupation. An occupier has traditionally been precluded from making substantial changes in the legal or political infrastructure of the state it controls. But the Iraq experience led some to claim that this ‘conservationist principle’ had been largely ignored in practice. Moreover, transformation was said to accord with a variety of important trends in contemporary international law, including the rebuilding of post-conflict states along liberal democratic lines, the extra-territorial application of human rights treaty obligations, and the decline of abstract conceptions of territorial sovereignty. This article argues that these claims are substantially overstated. The practice of Occupying Powers does not support the view that liberal democratic transformations are widespread. Human rights treaties have never been held to require states parties to legislate in the territories of other states. More importantly, the conservationist principle serves the critical function of limiting occupiers' unilateral appropriation of the subordinate state's legislative powers. Post-conflict transformation has indeed been a common feature of post-Cold War legal order, but it has been accomplished collectively, most often via Chapter VII of the UN Charter. To grant occupiers authority to reverse this trend by disclaiming any need for collective approval of ‘reforms’ in occupied states would be to validate an anachronistic unilateralism. It would run contrary to the multilateralization of all aspects of armed conflict, evident in areas well beyond post-conflict reconstruction.