EDITORIAL

The goal of the military legal science is “...[t]o achieve the establishment of a unified set of principles upon which may be grounded the military and wartime legislation of the various States, whereby a system of rules will be developed that will in some way serve as a spiritual nexus between peoples, and by which law makers and lawyers will feel that they are working for the common good of the mankind as a whole, in the hope of one day attaining durable peace or at the very least the certainty of being able to avoid the horrors of unrestricted warfare”.

Giuseppe Ciardi, President of the International Society for Military law and the Law of War, Military Law and the Law of War Review, Issue 1-1, 1962, Opening Address

Dear Readers,

It is with great pleasure and a bit of pride that I open my first editorial for the 2011 Volume of the Military Law and the Law of War Review. It has been a fascinating year, in the course of which our Journal has gone through a complex evolution aimed at improving its contents and overall dissemination. A period rich in both challenges and achievements, which has required a good deal of work by the members of the editorial board and the assistance of a growing number of experts, who all contributed, in different capacities and manners, to the success of the editorial process.

In this respect, I must first of all warmly thank my colleagues who sit in the board of our Review. They are the first to whom the success of this transitional period should be attributed. Their passion and dedication have been indispensable to meet the goals we originally planned more than one year ago. In addition, my thanks go to the Belgian Centre for Military Law and the Law of War and the International Society for Military law and the Law of War, for their confidence in my capacity and competence to successfully perform as the Editor-in-Chief of the Review. My gratitude also goes to Valentina Cadelo and Marco Benatar, who gladly joined our board as editorial assistants in October 2011. They did an excellent job; working with them is a real privilege. I am thankful to the pool of (young) international experts who translated the articles’ summaries into each of the six official languages of our Journal. You may find their names in the second page of each issue. Needless to say, we also sincerely thank all authors for their time, efforts and interest in our Review. Last but not least, I wish to thank all the anonymous peer-reviewers who offered their valuable assistance during the articles’ screening process. Their support was indispensable in keeping the level of academic quality of articles pretty high.

Acting as the Editor-in-Chief of the Review today also assumes a particular meaning, since 2012 marks the 50th Anniversary of our Journal. In order to celebrate this event in a fitting manner, the Review was given the opportunity to organize a special panel during the Society’s Conference on Military Jurisdiction, held in Rhodes (Greece) on 30th September 2011. The panel was entitled ‘The Role and Responsibilities of Legal Advisors in the Armed Forces - Evolution and Present Trends’ – a topic we deem particularly interesting for our community of readers, which is primarily composed of practitioners in the field of military and security law. Two distinguished speakers (Thomas E. Randall and Ian Henderson), and a well-known discussant (Dr Marten Zwanenburg) attended the panel, which I had the pleasure to chair. The papers presented in Rhodes by our panelists, together with the contributions of other experienced legal advisors (Liron A. Libman and Robert McLaughlin) were subsequently brought together in a special section, or Agora, which opens this first issue. As we all know rather well, in current military operations the role of military and civilian legal advisors is central, and the expertise required from them has expanded greatly beyond its traditional scope and now ranges from the law of armed conflict to state-building, from disciplinary to criminal law, from human rights to transitional justice. This is another reason why the Review commits itself to expand the topics covered in its articles, and embraces the analysis of new subject matters related to the broader area of security law. Due to the breadth and exceptional significance of the issues considered in these contributions, I commend them to the attention of any professional in the field of military and operational law. I am sure that our readers will easily recognise in the thoughts of our authors many of the challenges they face in their daily professional activity.

If this was the year 1962, when the Review was founded, you would now be reading an opening address by another Italian legal scholar, probably much more authoritative and talented than me. I am referring to Giuseppe Ciardi, Professor of Law at the University of Rome and prominent Military Judge, who was the Society’s President at that time, and whose efforts were essential in giving birth to the Review. I quoted above an excerpt from Prof. Ciardi’s first opening address, which was published in 1962 in the first issue of the Review. In it, you will find such terms as ‘spiritual nexus between peoples’, ‘working for the common good of the mankind’ and ‘attaining durable peace’. Indeed, taking into account moral and ethical goals when asked to develop legal theories is simply unavoidable for a good civil servant, compelling for a military officer and at the basis of the academic’s deontology. Notwithstanding the passage of half a century, the underlying goals and values of the Review have remained the same.

However, while the vision, commitment, and aims and beliefs have remained the same, the challenges faced by legal professionals in the military world have changed dramatically. They now require a much higher and diversified set of expertise in different disciplines, at all levels. The editorial board has responded to this changed reality by including new members and expanding its outreach, visibility and overall organizational capacities. I would say that this mix of tradition and modernization has now become the main quality of our Journal. In the past five years, we have opened our editorial board to new members. The board is now composed of practitioners with a prominent academic background and scholars having a solid grasp of the operational dimension of their studies. This mix of theory and practice guarantees a pragmatic approach to the analysis of legal issues and the comprehensive coverage of the key legal developments in the field of military operations and military organization at the international level.

The Review is now available on-line at the HeinOnline web repository. Subscribers are granted unlimited access to the Review’s contents starting from 1962 to date. This has greatly improved the dissemination of the Review among scholars, with a growing number of citations in other legal publications. Thirdly, the Military Law and the Law of War Review has now a brand-new website, which you may find at http://www.mllwr.org. We are continuously adding to the website relevant information and news of interest to our readers. Furthermore, the editorial board is working on a revised and more comprehensive editorial policy. Coming to the quality of articles, external peer-review and pre-review assessment by the editorial board are used to assess all the contributions submitted. This has also encouraged a vivid and intense exchange of information and ideas within the Board. All these activities are intended to make the Review even more successful and appealing to a broader audience of readers. Moreover, apart from the website and the organization of the panel in Rhodes, in order to further the internationalisation of our Journal, we also launched two calls for papers, focused on the aforesaid role of legal advisors and the recent conflict in Libya. In response to the latter call, we now publish the articles by Martin Fink and Tommaso Natoli, dealing with the naval embargo operations and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ concept, respectively.

Committed to the internationalization principle, this issue hosts contributions in three languages: English, Italian and Dutch. Our Dutch contribution it is written Lt. Col. Chris De Cock and deals with the conception of Jus ad Bellum/Jus in Bello in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. The interplay between the two branches of the law of war continues to be a topical theme – as the recent international military campaign in Libya demonstrates – and deserves further attention by scholars. Last but not least, this issue also contains a substantial contribution by Magne Frostad on the still pressing topic of the responsibility of sending States for human rights violations during peace support operations, in particular as regards detention. This first issue is closed by three well-substantiated book reviews by Marco Benatar, Alfons Vanheusden and Andrea Carcano on maritime power, military operations in Afghanistan and the Law of Armed Conflict, respectively.