This “New Voices in International Law” panel brings together two innovative scholars, exploring different aspects of personalizing international law. Shiri Krebs is an associate professor of law at Deakin Law School. She is also the co-lead of law and policy theme at the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre, an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center on International Security and Cooperation, and the chair of the Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict. Julian Huertas is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He is currently on leave from Universidad de La Sabana, where he has been assistant professor of international law since 2014.
Both Krebs's and Huertas's papers shed light on particularly timely topics. Krebs's paper discusses the challenges of the military relying on technology-related visual imagery in its targeting decisions. Such reliance is an increasing aspect of military operations and is particularly relevant with respect to the use of drones and other air warfare. As Krebs explains, increased reliance on such imagery has invisible technical and human-technical limits, and may also trigger cognitive and organizational biases that can drive erroneous interpretation of such visuals, leading to errors in risk assessment and legal evaluations of planned operations. This has also led to a lack of oversight and accountability when mistakes are made, with outcomes ranging from a lack of disciplinary measures to the failure to implement changes to policy and practice in order to ensure better targeting decisions in the future. Given recent events concerning civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations, including reports of a 2019 strike in Baghuz, Syria and the 2021 strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, in which an Afghan aid worker was erroneously targeted and killed along with nine other civilians, Krebs's research and findings have the opportunity to provide special value to efforts to improve civilian casualty policy at the U.S. Department of Defense.
Huertas's paper explores a means of using individual human rights to more broadly respond to threats to democracy. In particular, he discusses the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ more recent approach of framing government actions in Venezuela that violate individual rights as part of a broader anti-democratic scheme. As part of this process, the Court's rulings have taken a two-pronged approach: They have ordered remedies for the affected individuals and have also ordered Venezuela to reform the underlying policies that contributed to these violations and in one case even ordered such reform where there was no violation of an individual human right.
The following summary includes the main arguments and ideas developed through each of these papers.
