This chapter analyses the circumstances under which superiors incur liability for the acts of their subordinates. A fundamental question posed in this chapter is whether all types of superiors are liable in accordance with the same criteria, or whether this depends upon each particular person's de facto or de jure status. The chapter presents an analysis of the necessary and reasonable measures expected of operational, tactical and POW camp commanders, as well as the extent of their liability in accordance with either the people they command or control, or the territory that they occupy. Regulation 8(ii) of the British Royal Warrant was subsequently construed by the United Nations War Crimes Commission as referring to a matter of evidence and not of substantive law. The chapter examines the applicable mens rea standard required under the doctrine of command responsibility, as well as possible lege ferenda standards.

Freedom of expression in Article 10(1) has been given an appropriately broad interpretation when the scope of the concept has had to be considered. In its Recommendation 38 of September 1949 the Consultative Assembly listed freedom of assembly and freedom of association as two separate rights. They are grouped together in Article 11 of the Convention. The right to marry and to found a family is to be exercised 'according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right'. Article 13 provides: 'Everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity.' Making out a case under Article 13 involves demonstrating that the rights of action and other means of redress available under domestic law are inadequate, which may be difficult.

Chapter 4 addresses the notion of humanitarianism as predicated on distance, that is, geographical scale. This is prominently embodied in the figure of the distant stranger, a trope ubiquitous and simplistic in equal measure. In this context, what role does distance play for people’s desire to intervene in the lives of others? What compels people to support those nearby, regional neighbours, or across nation states and continents? The chapter illustrates how people create and respond to distance, and how this shapes their personal and professional trajectories, and interventions in the lives of others. This matters not least because the notion of distance, physical and social, looms large in how philosophers and ordinary people construct responsibilities towards others. Unravelling these tropes, everyday humanitarian practice shows how distance is not fixed, but dynamic and flexible. Those who intervene outside of their own country are attracted to help in faraway places not least by a desire for travel and adventure. When faced with street children or begging veterans on a daily basis, some find they need to keep poverty at bay. They move between immersing themselves, and withdrawing when it becomes overwhelming. Embedding themselves in local communities of need, or retreating, sometimes for good, to more comfortable surroundings, requires constant negotiation and raises moral quandaries. As practitioners are using sliding scales, humanitarian distance emerges not as fixed, but segmented into mobile, interlocking and dynamic scales, which they adopt as it suits their situation.

Humankind has enjoyed a rich history of wars, ever since men could organise themselves into fighting units against adversary forces. While international law categorically sanctioned the resort to war other than for legitimate self-defence, the family of nations has since time immemorial, whether individually or collectively, attempted to regulate personal conduct in warfare. After the Thirty Years War, which was terminated with the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia, war became an interstate affair, rather than as previously a personal feud between princes. This chapter examines the evolution of custom in international humanitarian law and the elements that demonstrate evidence of state practice and opinio juris with regard to criminalisation. Wright, in his comments to the concluding Law Report of the allied trials of World War II, claimed that the punishment of war criminals had 'been recognised by the practice of nations and [was] part of the traditional law'.

The need for new arrangements stemmed from the success of the Convention, whilst the means selected to enable the system to cope with the increasing demand was the creation of a new Court of Human Rights to replace the original institutions. This chapter describes the main features of the new Court, outlines its procedures and reviews its work in order to explain the current supervisory arrangements. Normally, failure to appeal to the Constitutional Court will lead to a ruling of inadmissibility on the ground of non-exhaustion of domestic remedies. With the advent of Protocol No. 11, a new Agreement was required and so the European Agreement relating to Persons Participating in Proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights was concluded in 1996. Judgments of a Chamber and of the Grand Chamber must be reasoned and, as with the original Court, any judge may deliver a separate opinion.

Chapter 5 engages with the COVID-19 pandemic which seemed to many as though we were living in ‘the world of post-apocalypse movies’. This chapter argues that rather than being tangential to nuclear politics, global health crises – such as COVID-19 – are exacerbated by how states prioritise nuclear weapons and military spending as solutions to security threats. The author analyses how the Trump administration’s decision to end a pandemic early warning system, the UK government’s failure to take the findings of a pandemic planning exercise seriously, and the early handling of the COVID-19 pandemic during February–April 2020 demonstrate how poorly prepared states are for security threats and health crises, such as those that would be generated by a nuclear conflict or accident. Moreover, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals how a state-centric, military-focused understanding of security makes the world less, rather than more, safe. Subsequently, the chapter builds upon recent work in critical security studies and argues that by reconceptualising security differently and moving away from the importance of the state as the object to be secured, not only can we better understand and critique the political and ethical dimensions of nuclear weapons, but we can also contribute towards reforming security and addressing the harms that nuclear weapons cause in the Third Nuclear Age.

The medieval Christian world held neutrality in low esteem. It could hardly do otherwise, given the prevailing concept of war in Christian thought as a contest between justice and injustice. True to their intellectual heritage of just-war ideas, neither Gentili nor Grotius had a strong conception of a set of rights of neutrals as such. Neutrals were nevertheless recognised as having rights of a sort: the basic rights which natural law accorded to persons and states generally. The so-called 'rights' of neutrals comprised, in reality, an alliance between general natural-law rights and the freedom of action 'left over' when the rights of belligerents came to a stop. Even with the evolution of these sets of basic rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents, a host of practical problems remained relating to their exercise in practice.

Chapter 7 analyses events between August and October 2020 and begins by discussing the revelation that money given to the Pentagon for face masks and medical equipment was instead funnelled to defence contractors to make jet engine parts and body armour. The author argues that militarism and the entrenchment of the nuclear-military-industrial complex across economics, politics, media, and society serve to make the world less safe. In particular, the chapter focuses on the absurdities of the Pentagon awarding a $13 billion contract to Northrup Grumman to build a new fleet of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Such developments reflect a staggering level of exterminism given that in a bizarre hangover from the Cold War, ICBM silos based across the American Midwest are intended to act as a ‘nuclear sponge’ to draw an enemy attack away from larger American cities. Also central to this chapter is the impact that militarism and nuclear weapons currently have on exacerbating climate change, and the potential climate impact of even a small nuclear war that could annihilate all life on earth By discussing the influence of lobbying, cronyism, and corruption in and beyond the nuclear-military-industrial complex, this chapter draws attention to the political economy and environmental harm that underpins the Third Nuclear Age.

Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, just as Vattel and Hübner were writing, an important new phase in the law of neutrality was beginning. Belligerents were starting to wage economic war upon one another in a more thoroughgoing fashion than before. Various innovations in belligerents' rights were not supinely accepted by neutrals. Attempts of various kinds were made by neutral states to defend their claimed rights. In the process, some far-reaching legal innovations were made. With the spectre of total war removed, at least for the time being, it would prove possible for the states of the world gradually to reach a degree of agreement on some of the specific issues of the law of neutrality, if not on its more fundamental points. A time of confrontation was about to give way to a time of accommodation.

From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, the law of neutrality came of age. This was achieved by the growth of a network of bilateral treaties of 'amity and commerce' between the principal European states. Resolution of neutrality issues by means of bilateral treaties was not an invention of the seventeenth century. The most striking feature of the treaty network of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was its liberality towards neutrals. Neutral ships sometimes attempted to undermine the visit-and-search process in unscrupulous ways. One was by destroying crucial evidence, for example by hastily throwing the ship's papers overboard as a belligerent ship approached. If Britain was gradually emerging as a consistent advocate of broad rights for belligerents, certain other states were moving in the opposite direction. From the 1780s, the effect of British free riding was set to become more apparent, to the particular discomfiture of France, Britain's long-term enemy.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the code-of-conduct school of thought would have the doctrinal field largely to itself. But it continued to be a broad church, with the split between the deductive wing and the pragmatic line remaining very much in evidence. It was, accordingly, an age of diversity within this framework. More significant, though, was the fact that state practice was pushing the law in the direction of a certain uniformity, with a broad consensus for redressing the juridical 'balance of power' more in favour of the rights of neutrals than of belligerents. The high point of this trend was the adoption of the Declaration of Paris in 1856, when the world definitively resolved that the 'free ships-free goods' principle should become a rule of general law. In the nineteenth century, practice rather than theory continued to play the leading role in the evolution of the law of neutrality generally.