Thomas Probert

@thomasprobert.com

734 Followers 1052 Following

Documenting serious violations of international humanitarian law. Formerly @UNHumanRights. Writes slowly on the politics of human rights and development. Posts slower. London • Geneva • Cambridge • Pretoria

EVs, though a clear improvement on their petrol predecessors, reproduce many of the same problems of car-based urbanism, binding us into a system of maintaining expensive machines that are stationary 95% of the time. The loss of Zipcar isn’t a business failure; it’s a warning that our leaders’ transport priorities are out of whack. Ultimately, if we want a country built for people rather than parked cars, we need to get serious about sharing.

The IACHR reiterates that, under the standards of the Inter-American Human Rights System, the use of military force for public security purposes should be exceptional, strictly regulated, and limited to circumstances where civilian authorities are unable to respond effectively. The deployment of armed forces in operations against alleged criminal groups, particularly outside the territory, carries a high risk of arbitrary deprivation of life, lack of accountability, violations of due process, and erosion of civilian oversight.

The law of armed conflict is generally a more permissive legal regime for the use of military force than international human rights law (IHRL). In particular, the LOAC permits targeting members of the armed forces, including members of organized armed groups, based on their status, and others if and for such time as they “directly participate in hostilities,” which encompasses more than conducting attacks. By contrast, targeting based on status outside an armed conflict is prohibited. Acts opening the door to the use of force against an individual are generally limited to situations in which they pose an imminent threat of death or grievous bodily harm. If the Hegseth and Bradley orders and the ensuing second strike had been violations of LOAC in a non-international armed conflict, they would, a fortiori, have violated human rights law as a matter of peacetime law enforcement.

With respect to the U.S. lethal strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels at issue here, two of us (Schmitt and Goodman, along with co-author Marko Milanovic) have explained why “there is absolutely no question that the U.S. lethal strikes on the boats are a violation of international human rights law.” Without rehashing that analysis here, the bottom line is that the U.S. strikes on suspected drug traffickers at sea are clearly arbitrary deprivations of the right to life under IHRL, an obligation that the United States acknowledges applies extraterritorially. As they wrote:

The widely-accepted standard for arbitrariness prohibits the use of force likely to cause death or grievous bodily injury “except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives” (Basic Principles on…

Hard copies of the Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Assembly (OUP, 2025)

At the same time, we call on all States Parties to the Rome Statute to cooperate fully with the Court. El Hishri is the second suspected perpetrator of international crimes at Mitiga Prison to be arrested on European soil this year.
In January, Italian authorities arrested Osama Elmasry Njeem, another Libyan national and high-ranking member of Al-Radaa, accused of similar crimes at Mitiga. However, instead of surrendering him to the ICC to face
accountability, Italian authorities returned him to Libya, where he was welcomed by both officials and armed actors - reinforcing the prevailing climate of impunity.

Campaigners at the meeting that adopted the Shoreditch Declaration for a torture-free trade treaty

Mural off Cable Street in the East End of London commemorating the “Battle of Cable St” which resisted Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1936

Global consultation on the UNSR on freedom of assembly’s “model protocol” for law enforcement officials around peaceful protest in Geneva

Photo of the front cover of the ACHPR’s Study on Use of Force