According to rationalists and constructivists, compliance with international law occurs to the extent that states see non-compliance as unreasonable or wrong, respectively. An alternative account of compliance points to the practical difficulty of deciding to act contrary to international law. Here non-compliance is blocked rather than morally or instrumentally deterred. This article advances an organisational-process theory of this third kind. The explanatory mechanism lies in the constitutive rules of foreign policymaking, and points to the institutional function of legal advising. Under certain structural conditions (namely, lawyerised decision-making) legal advisers operate as the principal ‘agents of compliance’ within the state, bringing international law into the policymaking process and thus bridging the gap between foreign policy and legal expectations. The theory is applied to the interrogation programme implemented by the United States in the early years of the ‘War on Terror’ (2001–5). While initially violative of international legal standards, the programme eventually shifted towards compliance. Using process tracing, the case study provides fine-grained evidence that corroborates the explanatory power of organisational factors, in general, and legal advising, in particular.

This casenote outlines and analyses the US Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In this case the Court held that suspected terrorists held in Guantánamo Bay were entitled to bring habeas corpus petitions to federal courts and to the benefits of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The US Supreme Court eschewed the tradition of judicial deference to overturn the President's determination that military commissions could be established without congressional approval in the circumstances of the ‘War on Terrorism’. The casenote goes on to consider the aftermath of this decision, including the introduction of the Military Commissions Act 2006, and the implications of this Act for the future of Guantánamo Bay litigation.

The article addresses the question which consequences the war on terrorism has for the practice of and thinking about humanitarian intervention. The discussions about the legality and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention reached their peak after the NATO bombardments against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to protect the Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, which led to the war on terrorism, however, changed the focus of attention. The central question for international lawyers is no longer whether states may use force to protect human rights, but whether the use of force in anticipatory self-defence is allowed under international law in view of new security threats. After describing humanitarian intervention after the end of the Cold War, the impact of the war on terrorism on the protection of human rights is analysed. Although some authors think that the war on terrorism can coincide with the protection of human rights, the present author is more pessimistic. Subsequently the concept of the responsibility to protect is discussed. The author concludes that this concept is less revolutionary as some authors claim it to be. Most importantly, it does not provide a legal justification for the use of force to protect human rights without permission of the Security Council. The last section of the article therefore investigates whether the principle of necessity can serve as a potential legal justification for an intervention for human protection purposes without Security Council authorization.

The year 2005 was a significant year in terms of the development, elucidation and enforcement of international humanitarian law. It saw the adoption of a Third Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions introducing a third protective emblem, the publication by the International Committee of the Red Cross (hereafter, ICRC) of its much anticipated study of customary international humanitarian law, and the first ever referral of a situation by the United Nations Security Council (hereafter, Council) to the International Criminal Court.

These positive developments contrasted with widespread violations of humanitarian law in a number of major and minor armed conflicts and in the context of the so-called ‘war on terrorism’.