Suchergebnisse

Up until the 1970s, intimate partner violence (IPV) was routinely ignored in Britain, the United States and Canada, unless it has escalated to homicide; Dutton (2006a) labelled this the "age of denial" (p.16), here the sanctity and privacy of the home was valued and to be upheld. However, when Erin Pizzey opened the first women's shelter in 1971 for women who were escaping abusive relationships, a research movement began to explore men's violence against women. What followed was the development of a gendered model of IPV. Proponents of the gendered, or feminist, model (e.g., Dobash & Dobash, 1979, 2004) posit that IPV is an asymmetrical problem of men's violence towards women, with gender ascribed as a causal factor. The violence exhibited is constructed as an extension of the domination and control of wives by their husbands. This male privilege and control narrative has exerted considerable influence since the 1970's and deserves considerable credit for the influence it has had politically and in terms of awareness raising; however, it might now be argued to be in danger of offering a one size fits all response to what is clearly a complex social problem. The fixation on gender as central no longer accounts for a number of contemporary research findings (see Bates, Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2014) and thus is potentially holding back our understanding of IPV.

States must disseminate international humanitarian law (IHL) and integrate it into military instruction. Implementation of the IHL training obligation was delayed in the UK; when the government asserted that IHL was inapplicable to colonial warfare, resisted the development of the IHL of non-international armed conflict, and was keen to maintain the nuclear deterrent. Absent or perfunctory IHL training correlated with recurrent violations of the prohibitions of torture and inhuman treatment, from the 1950s to the 2000s. Despite official assertions that the British Army's training in IHL was being reformed following the death of Baha Mousa in British military custody in 2003, there were gradual changes from 2004 to 2011, and more thorough improvements from 2012 to 2017. Training materials for soldiers and officers now offer breadth and detail on IHL, with elements of international human rights law. They implement the 71 recommendations in the Baha Mousa Public Inquiry Report which the Ministry of Defence accepted, and are supplemented by practical training. Yet these are reactive reforms, which still lack norm-by-norm evaluation of soldiers' understanding. Prohibitions on humiliating or degrading treatment of a sexual nature, and on the intentional infliction of severe mental pain and suffering are (respectively) under-emphasised and absent. References to the necessity of restraint positions (as opposed to the prohibited stress positions) may cause confusion. There is a simplistic suggestion that reprisals are lawful if they are politically authorised. Training reforms have been cited as one reason to close criminal investigations into alleged war crimes: a response which neglects coexistent investigatory obligations.

AbstractThe UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has closed hundreds of investigations into alleged ill-treatment of detainees by British troops in Iraq. This article probes one reason given for the closure of these investigations: the assertion (without further evidence) that the allegations were 'less serious', 'lower-level' or in the 'middle' range of severity. These terms usually appear without reference to international law, and are once defined with reference to the English criminal law of assault, so that investigations were closed if the alleged treatment resulted in less than grievous bodily harm. The MOD's terminology is wrong-headed and conceptually underinclusive: it fails to grasp the threshold of inhuman or degrading treatment in international human rights law (IHRL), and largely neglects the investigatory obligations in IHRL, international humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law (ICL).

On September 16, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) gave its judgment in the case of Hassan v. United Kingdom.This is the Court's first explicit engagement with the co-applicability of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in relation to detention in international armed conflicts. The judgment is significant for its rejection of the government's argument that international humanitarian law operates as lex specialis to displace international human rights law entirely during the "active hostilities phase of an international armed conflict." It is also noteworthy for the majority's ruling that provisions on detention of prisoners of war and the internment of protected persons in the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949 could be read into Article 5 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights (the European Convention), creating a new ground for detention under Article 5(1) in international armed conflicts and modifying the procedural guarantees in Article 5(4).

AbstractThe obligation to train troops in international humanitarian law (IHL) is simply stated and its implementation delegated to State discretion. This reflects a past assumption that mere dissemination of IHL would be an effective contribution to the prevention of violations. Academic literature has evolved so that dissemination alone is now known to be insufficient for compliance, while the ICRC's integration model emphasizes the relevance of IHL to all aspects of military decision-making. A separate process, the ICRC/Government of Switzerland Initiative on Strengthening Compliance with IHL, is still in its consultative stages at the time of writing, but may result in voluntary State reporting and/or thematic discussions at meetings of States. This article synthesizes academic and practitioner insights on effective IHL training, and suggests a collaborative rubric for informative, standardized reporting on IHL training. Such a rubric could enable States and researchers to share best practice and future innovations on IHL training, using a streamlined, cost-effective tool.