The ICTY Trial Judgment in the Prosecutor v. Tihomir Blaškić is the first judicial decision to explicitly address unlawful attack charges. This article reviews the judgment focusing on how the trial chamber addressed individual criminal responsibility, unlawful attack charges, the crime against humanity of persecution, and the relationship between the two offences. The author observes that the decision contains little legal analysis but a review of the factual findings sheds light on legal assumptions. In particular, the findings indicate a willingness to accept that indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks might provide evidence of attacks essentially directed against civilians, a tendency to regard ad hoc ill equipped resistance to an attack as equivalent to no resistance, and a tendency to evaluate the lawfulness of an attack on the basis of what happened after the attack as well as during the attack.

En la introducción a un estudio anterior de la Convención de las Naciones Unidas sobre prohibiciones o restricciones del empleo de ciertas armas convencionales de 1980 (Convención sobre las armas convencionales) el autor cita la observaci:ón del ya fallecido Sir Hersch Lauterpacht: «si el derecho internacional es, en cierto modo, el punto de fuga del derecho, el derecho de la guerra está, quizás aun más patentemente, en el punto de fuga del derecho internacional» El autor lleva más allá la afirmación de Lauterpacht y sugiere que el punto de fuga del derecho de la guerra podría encontrarse en la rama del derecho que limita el empleo de armas. Después de exponer lo anterior, el autor descubre que un colega suyo había hecho también las observaciones de Sir Hersch afirmando, además, que el punto de fuga del derecho de la guerra es el derecho de la guerra en el aire.

Warships are designed for fighting in war. In peacetime, the primary task of warships and of their crews is to prepare for war. At the same time, because they are a visible embodiment of force, they may, at the pleasure of the executive, be employed on other tasks where the display of force is useful, such as the protection of sovereignty or the enforcement of laws both domestic and international. Some countries — the United States is an example — as a matter of principle, do not use warships to assist in the enforcement of national laws. Others, such as the United Kingdom and Canada, do use warships for such tasks. As a matter of practice, however, Canadian warships are rarely used for law enforcement against Canadian vessels.