March 2006 has been a black month for the UN tribunal authorities in The Hague. Not only has the nationalist Serb war criminal Milan Babić committed suicide in his prison cell, but the man against whom Babić testified in 2002, Slobodan Milošević – the first head of state to be indicted for war crimes – has also died. Milošević's trial was being seen as a crucial test of international law.

Andrew Bearpark is the Director General of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC), an independent trade association representing the leading companies in the specialist private security and risk management sector in the United Kingdom. The association aims to raise the standards of its members and the emergent industry as a whole and ensure compliance with the rules and principles of international humanitarian law and human rights. Prior to taking up his position, Mr. Bearpark served as Director of Operations and Infrastructure for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. From 1998 to 2003, he was Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General in charge of the European Union Pillar of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and was previously Deputy High Representative based in Sarajevo and responsible for the Reconstruction and Return Task Force, a grouping of international organizations facilitating minority return in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before taking up his positions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Mr. Bearpark held a series of senior positions in the UK, such as Head of the Information and Emergency Aid Departments of the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) and Private Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Judge Philippe Kirsch (Canada) is president of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and is assigned to its Appeals Division. He is a member of the bar of the province of Quebec and was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1988. In 1998, Judge Kirsch served as chairman of the Committee of the Whole of the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (the Rome Conference). He was also chairman of the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court (1999–2002). Judge Kirsch has extensive experience in the development of international criminal law, with particular regard to issues related to terrorism. His experience in international humanitarian law includes serving as chairman of the Drafting Committee of the International Conference on the Protection of War Victims (1993), the Drafting Committee at the 26th and 27th International Conferences of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (1995, 1999) and related meetings. He also chaired the Canadian National Committee on Humanitarian Law (1998–9) and was a member of the Group of International Advisers to the International Committee of the Red Cross (2000–3).

Salomón Lerner Febres was the President of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru from 2001 to 2003. After two decades of armed conflict, political violence and suffering due to an authoritarian regime, the Commission, created by the government of Peru, was established to face up to the factors which made violence possible, and to the consequences of destruction and of physical and moral suffering, especially in the most humble and impoverished sectors of Peruvian society. The Commission published its report on 28 April 2003. Salomón Lerner is now President of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, where he was Rector from 1994 to 2004. He was also President of the Union of Latin American Universities, where he had previously been Vice-President for universities in the Andean region. After studying law in Peru and obtaining a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), Dr Lerner worked at a number of academic institutions and is currently a research associate at Tokyo University. In addition to several other awards, he was honoured as ‘Great Official of the Order of Merit of Peru’ by Peru's Ministry of Domestic Affairs in 2003.

General Sir Rupert Smith served in the British Army in East and South Africa, Arabia, the Caribbean, Europe and Malaysia before commanding, as a major-general, the British 1st Armoured Division during the Gulf War. As the first Assistant Chief of Defence Operations and Security at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence in 1992, he was intimately involved in the United Kingdom's development of the strategy in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1995 he was Commander UNPROFOR in Sarajevo and in 1996–8 was the Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland. His final assignment was as Deputy Supreme Commander Allied Powers Europe in 1998–2001, covering the NATO operation “Allied Force” during the Kosovo conflict and the development of the European Security and Defence Identity. He retired from the army in 2002. Since 2006 he has been international advisor to the ICRC. His experience is shared to some extent through the words of his treatise on modern warfare, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Penguin, London, 2005).

Truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, reparations, public apologies and other mechanisms of transitional justice are the new mantras of the post-cold-war era. Their purpose is to foster reconciliation in societies that have experienced widespread human-rights violations and to promote reform and democracy, the ultimate aim being to defuse tension. But to what degree are these mechanisms, which are financially and politically supported by the international community and NGOs, truly effective? Very little, in fact, is known about their impact. By examining the underlying hypotheses and workings of transitional justice and proposing a series of indicators to evaluate its results, this article helps to fill the gap.

Continuous transformation of armed conflict since the adoption in 1864 of the first international humanitarian law treaty compels international humanitarian law to adapt accordingly. These adaptations, through either customary law or new multilateral treaties, always have been towards greater protection, greater reach. As for treaty practice, international humanitarian law historically has been substantially revised every twenty-five to thirty years. This article links those revisions to specific conflicts which laid bare deficiencies in the existing law. What follows is thus a chronicle of conflicts with their most critical humanitarian issues. From this emerges a picture of the changing face of armed conflict since the middle of the nineteenth century. The article also considers recent challenges to international humanitarian law and speculates on possible responses.

Based on the example of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the author analyses the conditions necessary from a philosophical and philological perspective — even if they are never enough — to move from war to reconciliation, and thus to deal with hatred: a policy of remembrance, a policy of justice and a policy of speech.

Although long hidden from the public gaze of international humanitarian law, military entrepreneurialism has played a key role in the global organization of legitimate violence. By examining historical changes in the role and legal treatment of military entrepreneurs, the author sheds light on the contemporary “resurfacing” of privately organized violence in the form of private military companies, and its broader implications for international humanitarian law.

The right to the truth has emerged as a legal concept at the national, regional and international levels, and relates to the obligation of the state to provide information to victims or to their families or even society as a whole about the circumstances surrounding serious violations of human rights. This article unpacks the notion of the right to the truth and tests the normative strength of the concept against the practice of states and international bodies. It also considers some of the practical implications of turning “truth” into a legal right, particularly from the criminal law perspective.

The proliferation of judicial bodies is of particular prevalence in the field of international criminal law, where, despite the creation of an operational International Criminal Court, the political or factual exigencies of different situations have led to the establishment of specific criminal justice systems. The object of this synopsis is to study their variety and to sketch out the differences and similarities between existing international and internationalized criminal tribunals. The complexity and the sheer illimitable amount of information necessitated a condensed and synthesized visualization.

Inequality in arms, indeed, significant disparity between belligerents, has become a prominent feature of various contemporary armed conflicts. Such asymmetries, albeit not at all a new phenomenon in the field of warfare, no longer constitute a random occurrence of singular battles. As a structural characteristic of modern-day warfare asymmetric conflict structures have repercussions on the application of fundamental principles of international humanitarian law. How, for example, can the concept of military necessity, commonly understood to justify the degree of force necessary to secure military defeat of the enemy, be reconciled with a constellation in which one side in the conflict is from the outset bereft of any chance of winning the conflict militarily? Moreover, military imbalances of this scope evidently carry incentives for the inferior party to level out its inferiority by circumventing accepted rules of warfare. This article attempts tentatively to assess the repercussions this could have on the principle of reciprocity, especially the risk of the instigation of a destabilizing dynamic of negative reciprocity which ultimately could lead to a gradual intensification of a mutual disregard of international humanitarian law.

The threat to human rights posed by non-state actors is of increasing concern. The author addresses the international obligations of belligerents, national liberation movements and insurgent entities, looks at the growing demands that such armed groups respect human rights norms and considers some of the options for holding private military companies accountable with regard to human rights abuses. The argument developed throughout this article is that all sorts of non-state actors are increasingly expected to comply with principles of international human rights law.

This article modestly seeks to address some of the various matters related to transitional justice and focuses on whether penal repression for violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law must be insisted upon in all situations, or if there are cases where other action, in particular amnesties, would be more appropriate to ensure national reconciliation or the peaceful development of a country. Dilemmas clearly exist in responding to such choices, calling for the ability to maintain a judicious balancing act between competing important interests, including the most basic decision of whether or not to provoke the dragon on the patio.

This article analyses the role and content of proportionality under contemporary international law governing the use of force, with a view to clarifying the legal framework governing the conduct of the parties to an armed conflict. In the system of jus ad bellum, protection is primarily granted to the interest of the attacked state in repelling the attack; the other competing interests are considered only to curtail the choice of the means to be employed in order to achieve that aim. Conversely, in the system of jus in bello there is by definition no prevailing interest, but instead a variety of interests and values which are entitled to equal protection of the law and must be balanced against each other. The existence of two distinct normative systems, with distinct standards of legality applicable to the same conduct, does not as a rule give rise to major problems. The legality of recourse to force is measured against the proportionality of self-defence, whereas individual actions would have to conform to the requirement of proportionality in jus in bello. However, beyond the large area in which these two standards overlap, there might be situations in which the strict application of the jus ad bellum standard makes it impossible to achieve the aims of jus in bello. In these cases, the proportionality test under jus in bello must be regarded as part of the proportionality test under jus ad bellum. States must thus take humanitarian implications into account in determining the level of security they may seek to obtain using military action.

International humanitarian law is the branch of customary and treaty-based international positive law whose purposes are to limit the methods and means of warfare and to protect the victims of armed conflicts. Grave breaches of its rules constitute war crimes for which individuals may be held directly accountable and which it is up to sovereign states to prosecute. However, should a state not wish to, or not be in a position to, prosecute, the crimes can be tried by international criminal tribunals instituted by treaty or by binding decision of the United Nations Security Council. This brief description of the current legal and political situation reflects the state of the law at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It does not, however, describe the work of a single day or the fruit of a single endeavour. Quite the contrary, it is the outcome of the international community's growing awareness, in the face of the horrors of war and the indescribable suffering inflicted on humanity throughout the ages, that there must be limits to violence and that those limits must be established by the law and those responsible punished so as to discourage future perpetrators from exceeding them.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number of private military and security companies (PMCs/PSCs) operating in situations of armed conflict, as well as a change in the nature of their activities, which are now increasingly close to the heart of military operations and which often put them in close proximity to persons protected by international humanitarian law. It is often asserted that there is a vacuum in the law when it comes to their operations. In situations of armed conflict, however, there is a body of law that regulates both the activities of the staff of PMCs/PSCs and the responsibilities of the states that hire them. Moreover, other states also have a role to play in promoting respect for international humanitarian law by such companies. This article examines the key legal issues raised by PMCs/PSCs operating in situations of armed conflict, including the status of the staff of these companies and their responsibilities under international humanitarian law; the responsibilities of the states that hire them; and those of the states in whose territory PMCs/PSCs are incorporated or operate.