The interaction of law, politics and financial considerations have proved detrimental for staging criminal prosecutions, even to this day, but ultimately have not negated the criminal liability of perpetrators. This chapter explores the various forms of direct participation in humanitarian law offences. These are: planning and conspiracy; ordering others to commit a crime; incitement and dissemination of hate propaganda; and complicity. The chapter describes the concept of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention, the concept of criminal conspiracies has attracted the attention of the ILC regarding its Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. Draft Article 2 deals with the individual responsibility of participants in international offences. An order is unlawful when it violates international humanitarian law, regardless of its legitimacy under national law.

This chapter outlines the book’s innovative rendering of grassroots development and humanitarianism through a scalar approach (Carr and Lempert 2016). This addresses the problems of partial reach of all forms of humanitarianism, and documents how everyday practitioners devise a range of size-related and geographical scales that allow them to situate their efforts. It extends this scalar approach to social relations, and demonstrate what kind of relations are made, to what purpose, and how they upend conventional narratives of humanitarian objects. Taken together, they furnish an understanding of how its limited reach, and its partiality constitute not an obstacle, but a condition for humanitarian action.

Chapter 6 argues while geographical distance is not central for driving humanitarianism, neither is the strange distant other. Rather, a vast amount of financial assistance flows along kinship networks. Remittances from migrant workers to their families are well documented. In contrast, overseas aid given through taxpayers or private donors, is not meant to be bound by kinship ties. This would run counter to the aspiration of impartiality that underpins institutionalised humanitarianism. In practice, everyday humanitarians do precisely this: crafting kin relations with the people they support. Indeed, such partial relations are central to their way of operating. This is because kinship, other that friendship, does not demand, or imply equality. For professional aid workers who feel alienated by aid bureaucracy, ‘adopting’ a young person allows them to be embedded locally in a way difficult to achieve otherwise. For everyday humanitarians, both Cambodians and foreigners, making others into kin creates social relations which entail responsibilities. They allow for inequality to be accommodated, while calling for the provision of assistance. This can take the form of sponsoring an adopted son or daughter through school; supporting a Cambodian family that they have become part of; or conceiving a group of children at an after-school club as one’s family. Such humanitarian kinship runs counter to the principle of impartiality. What motivates humanitarian support is the creation of partiality through kinship ties. Being partial provides a rationale for whom to support, solving the problem of resource allocation posed by the limited-ness of their efforts.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, writers on international law began to propound where to seek the general law of neutrality. The result was the emergence of three rival schools of thought purporting to explain the law of neutrality. The three schools are the conflict-of-rights theory, code-of-conduct school, and community-interest school. Several important features of the school of thought should be carefully noted. One is its general stress on rights rather than duties, in practice, rather more on the rights of belligerents than of neutrals. Another fundamental feature of this approach is that neither the neutrals' nor the belligerents' rights are rooted in the law of war per se. Both are derived instead from general principles of international law. Two areas will serve to give a favour of coherent schools' divergent approaches: contraband and blockade.

Article 6, like Article 5, is one of the longest and most important provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. It guarantees the right to a fair trial. In the Golder case in 1975 the Court had to decide a point of fundamental importance relating to the scope of Article 6(1): whether this provision is concerned only with the way legal proceedings are conducted, or whether, in addition, it confers a right of access to the courts. The right guaranteed by Article 6(1) is to a fair and public hearing 'by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law'. Like the provisions of Article 6(3), the presumption of innocence is a specific aspect of the right to a fair trial, and for obvious reasons applies only in criminal cases.

As a herald of ever-advancing rights for neutrals, the Declaration of Paris proved to be a false dawn. The Declaration of Paris contained two explicit exceptions to the rule: contraband and blockade. To states which were mindful that total war might one day return to the international scene, the most important of all the exceptions to the 'free ships-free goods' principle was the belligerent right of blockade. There were some marginal cases in which belligerents made use of sovereign rights to further their ends instead of belligerents' rights properly speaking. In light of the various belligerent innovations of the late nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising that supporters of neutral rights became increasingly worried about how scrupulously the rights of neutrals, or whatever remained of them, would be observed in a future great-power conflict.

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.