Tom Dannenbaum (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) has posted Redressing Civilian Harm (Forthcoming in Civilian Protection in Armed Conflict (Jelena Pejic & Mattie Kotlik eds., OUP)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter explores the reparation of civilian harm under international humanitarian law (IHL). The chapter argues that civilians have clear substantive rights to reparation for harms suffered from IHL violations. That right finds support in both IHL and human rights law. Today, a strong case can be made that civilians also hold a procedural right to make such reparative claims. To recognize this is not to assert the unchecked prevalence of reparative rights over the demands of peace or the need to manage transaction costs amidst scarcity. It is, however, to insist that the pursuit of such objectives can only be justified according to a rights limitation and proportionality analysis that accords due weight to the underlying right and that preserves its minimum core. In that analysis, a key premise is that eschewing or limiting reparations does not avoid the costs of repair; it imposes them on victims.
Recommended.
