Liability for killing in war and why there is no ‘licence to kill’

Abstract

This column argues that it no longer makes sense to speak about the ‘moral equality of soldiers’ or a soldier's ‘licence to kill’ in wartime. International law now imposes individual criminal responsibility on those involved in the crime of aggression. International human rights law considers lives lost as a result of aggression to be arbitrary deprivations of the right to life and therefore the responsibility of the aggressor state. The individual soldiers on the aggressor side can be considered liable for contributing to acts violating the UN Charter and human rights law. This can lead to concrete legal consequences, such as becoming ineligible for asylum or liability to being individually sanctioned. Once we consider that all the lives lost as a result of aggression are human rights violations, this changes how violations of the right to life are reported and calculated. All soldiers and civilians killed as a result of a state's aggression are victims of human rights violations, and the claims of their survivors are just starting to be heard.