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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2019
Air strikes are the signature modality of violence used by NATO militaries. When civilian victims of NATO air strikes have turned to courts in NATO countries, they have generally not been successful. What are the legal techniques and legal knowledges deployed in Western courts that render Western aerial violence legal or extralegal? The article analyzes the responses by European courts to two sets of NATO bombings: the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and a September 2009 air strike near Kunduz, Afghanistan. The judgments rely on two forms of “legal technicalities”: the drawing of jurisdictional boundaries that exclude the airspace taken up by the bombers and the ground on which victims stood when they were killed as well as particular visual regimes that facilitate not seeing people on the ground as civilians.
Les frappes aériennes constituent la modalité de violence de prédilection utilisée par les forces armées de l’OTAN. Lorsque les victimes civiles de ces frappes aériennes se sont adressées aux tribunaux des pays membres de l’OTAN, elles n’ont généralement pas obtenu gain de cause. Quelles sont les techniques et les savoirs juridiques déployés dans les tribunaux occidentaux qui ont pour effet de rendre les violences aériennes occidentales légales ou extralégales? En réponse à cette question, le présent article analyse les réponses des tribunaux européens à l’endroit de deux séries de bombardements ordonnés par l’OTAN: le bombardement de la Yougoslavie en 1999 et une frappe aérienne près de Kunduz en Afghanistan réalisée en septembre 2009. Les jugements reposent sur deux formes de « technicalités juridiques ». La première est relative à la définition de limites juridictionnelles qui excluent l’espace aérien repris par les bombardiers et le terrain sur lequel se trouvaient les victimes lorsqu’elles furent tuées. La seconde est, quant à elle, reliée aux régimes visuels particuliers ayant permis d’interpréter la présence de personnes sur le terrain comme n’étant pas des civils.
Prior versions have been presented at the Law and Society Association Conference in Toronto as well as the Greifswald University Political Theory Research Colloquium. The author would like to thank the engaged audiences at both events as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for the Canadian Journal of Law and Society for their comments and suggestions. Research for this article was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) grant “Law and the Regulation of the Senses: Explorations in Sensori-Legal Studies.” Special thanks to Safiyah Rochelle for reading and commenting on a draft and to Michael Rothberg for facilitating extraterritorial PDF access.
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139 Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale,” 144.
