Saturday, March 24, 2007

Casus Belli?   [J. Peter Pham]

Amid all the coverage that Iran's seizure by force of fifteen Royal Navy personnel — eight sailors and seven marines — from HMS Cornwall, the flagship of joint Coalition and Iraqi naval force that patrols Iraqi territorial waters, no one has mentioned that this latest outrage by Iran has crossed a line of great significance. If satellite tracking proves that the British were indeed in Iraqi or international waters at the time of their capture, then Iran is not only in the wrong, but it has just, according to classical international law doctrine, also committed an act of war which hands the Coalition the legal right to respond accordingly.

At the onset of Israel's war in Lebanon last summer, Professor Michael I. Krauss of George Mason University School of Law and I showed in an op-ed that Lebanon, by allowing (whether by omission or commission) Hezbollah to launch an attack over an international border to kidnap two Israeli soldiers, had presented the Jewish state with casus belli, international legal justification to respond to an act of war with, well, war. If that is the juridical consequence of a sovereign government failing to control a terrorist group within its borders, the responsibility is even more apparent when the hostile act is carried out by an official military unit of a government, as the Revolutionary Guard clearly is.

So, did Iran just declare war on the Coalition? If so, then maybe, as the Security Council convenes this afternoon, it is high time the international community finally begin taking the mullahs at their word.

03/24 10:38 AMShare