Abousfian Abdelrazik (img: Project Fly Home)

Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik has been told that his children will not receive any state benefits as long as he remains of the UN 1267 terrorist blacklist. In a letter to the Canadian Press, the Canadian Government claimed that allowing child benefits would breach its obligations to the UN Security Council, which prohibits the supply of funds to those thought to be “associated with” Al-Qaida. The decision has attracted criticism of Canada’s willingness to comply with what many see as an unjust and illegitimate regime. The Canadian People’s Commission Network, which supports Abdelrazik’s campaign for delisting, expresses the problem succinctly: “”Here we have a regime that violates the most fundamental human rights: indefinitely stripping people of their liberty without trial, charge, evidence, based on guilt by association – and the government in Quebec is going along with it!”

This decision – to deny the provision of welfare benefits to the family members of those on the blacklist on the basis that to do otherwise would be “supporting” terrorism – is directly at odds with the approach taken by the European Courts on this issue. In the 2010 case of M and Others v HM Treasury, for example, the European Court of Justice expressly held that benefits paid to the spouses of blacklisted individuals were not to be prohibited. The purpose of the blacklist, according to the Court, was to prevent terror suspects from actually accessing financial resources that could be used for terrorism. As a result, asset-freezing only applied to “those assets that can be turned into funds, goods or services capable of being used to support terrorist activities” and so welfare benefits used to meet the essential needs of a household were allowed. This case – which adopts a sensible, purposive reading of the blacklisting provisions – in discussed in more detail in our Blacklisted report, available here . Whether the Canada adopts a more socially just or draconian approach to this issue will no doubt be determined through ongoing legal challenges and will be discussed in more detail by Professor Amir Attaran who will be speaking in Panel 2 of the conference.

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Taranis (img: BAE Systems)

A recent report by the UK Ministry of Defence has called for public debate on the ethical (and legal) issues surrounding drone warfare. Although rarely discussed, the UK are actually at the forefront of the development of drone warfare.  In January 2011, for example, the British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament that more than 124 insurgents had been killed by British drones over the past 29 months.  So just why is the British government’s own Defence Ministry now calling for an urgent public debate to occur on this issue?

The answer, in short, lies in the rapid development of drone technology toward fully autonomous (or robotic) systems. Reviewing plans to develop increasingly autonomous aircraft over the next decade, the authors urge a thorough discussion of possible deployment as a matter of urgency:

The pace of technological development is accelerating and the UK must establish quickly a clear policy on what will constitute acceptable machine behaviour in future [...] There is a danger that time is running out – is debate and development of policy even still possible, or is the technological genie already out of the ethical bottle, embarking us all on an incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality?

At present, unmanned aviation vehicles, or drones, are piloted remotely from army bases. An aircraft firing rockets over Afghanistan or Pakistan might be controlled by a pilot sitting 7,500 miles away in the Nevada desert. US Government officials have long confirmed their plans to reduce the level of human input still further, particularly during high-tempo armed offensives. At a press briefing in 2007, a Government representative stated: ‘the roadmap projects an increasing level of autonomy [..] there’s really no way that a system that’s remotely controlled can effectively operate in an offensive or defensive air combat environment.’ John Pike, an expert on defense and director of the Washington security Web site GlobalSecurity.org has estimated that autonomous armed robot systems will be operating by 2020.

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Protest in Abottabad on May 6 2011. (Image: ATP)

The recent killing of Osama Bin Laden has both drawn public attention to the US practice of targeted killing and led to widespread criticism of the legal position adopted by the Obama administration to justify their actions. This is a crucially important issue that will be addressed by both Sarah Knuckey (Director of the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at NYU) and Ben Wizner (Litigation Director of the ACLU’s National Security project) in Panel 3 of the Conference.

Rejecting the repeated assertion that ‘justice has been done’ – pronounced by, among others, the US President, the US Secretary of State and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon – a growing number of academics and human rights experts have expressed doubts over the legitimacy and legality of the attack. A joint statement issued by the UN Special Rapporteurs for Countering Terrorism (Martin Scheinin) and Extrajudicial Executions (Chris Heyns) declared that whilst the use of lethal force by states was permissible in certain circumstances, “the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially decided punishment”.  In this case, the US should “disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards. For instance it will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture Bin Laden.” Similarly, Michael Mansfield QC called for adequate investigations into the events and argued that “feelings of elation and relief [...] must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice.”

Foremost among these ‘core questions’ is the whether the use of lethal force against bin Laden took place within the context of an armed conflict or during peacetime. Read the rest of this entry »