assassination & the rule of law

We associate assassinations by one State on another’s territory - ‘targeted killings’ is the softer sounding word - with autocratic States.   But such killings are also undertaken by a variety of different States, and for diverse reasons.  Since the end of the Cold War, the most unacceptable have been to humiliate another State considered a threat, purely to wreak vengeance, to silence opposition or to undermine peace negotiations.
  
Since 1945 the UN founding Charter has made national sovereignty the fundamental, near inviolable, organising principle of international relations.    Yet in the last two decades, in flagrant disregard for the UK’s national sovereignty and international law, Russian agents have killed prominent Russian exiles on British soil.   Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, was poisoned in 2006 using radioactive polonium administered by two FSB agents who also contaminated several venues in London.  Then there were the ‘unexplained’ deaths: for example, in 2013 by a seemingly staged ‘suicide’, the hanging of Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and vocal critic of Putin.  Yet an unequivocal reaction from the UK government had to wait until March 2018.
  
Acting after a spectacular, reckless infringement of national sovereignty, Prime Minister Theresa May expelled 23 Russian diplomats following belatedly the attempted assassination at home in Salisbury with military grade nerve agent, Novichok, of former Russian FSB spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia.   Other European nations and the US followed suit.
   
Contamination was widespread.  An investigating policeman, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, became seriously ill after contact with the poison. That July Dawn Sturgess died from Novichok poisoning after spraying her wrists with polonium from the cast-off perfume bottle used by the assassins, another victim of Russian actions on British soil.    Putin, openly taunting the UK government, had the two GRU military intelligence agents, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, give an outrageous RT (State Television) interview in which they claimed to have been tourists with a particular interest in Salisbury cathedral.
​ 
There is nothing new about autocratic States eliminating opponents on the territory of other States.  Famously, in 1940 Leon Trotsky was brutally killed at his home in Mexico City on Stalin’s orders, the archetype for Putin’s actions: punishment for disloyalty, a warning against treachery. 

Apartheid South Africa used car, letter and parcel bombs in African countries against the ANC, Pan African Congress, and SWAPO (Namibian nationalist) exiles, but avoided alienating the UK by similar tactics.   Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, who instituted substantial funding for the ANC, was shot dead on the street in Stockholm in 1986; nobody was charged with the murder. Ten years later Colonel Eugene de Kock claimed – plausibly - this was a South African special unit ‘hit’.  The cynically named Civil Co-operation Bureau, and special units under Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok, planned and executed the assassinations. The general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Frank Chikane, was poisoned in 1989 with Paraoxon on Vlok’s instructions. He survived through treatment in an American hospital.
 
Modern drones have increased the opportunity for assassinations by decreasing the cost in manpower and money.  Drones also reduced the risk and stress on perpetrators.   The Predator drone came into use in 1995 allowing long distance elimination of jihadists and their leaders.   However, the killing of Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout required a full Special Forces’ operation with helicopters, watched in real time by President Obama.  The impact of 9/11 made drone killings in the Middle East routine.  As they responded to, or tried to pre-empt, militia and terrorist attacks, Israel and the USA were drawn even closer together.  The words of the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first” fitted the bill.
 
Israel has a long and known history of assassinations in other countries - in Israel’s view, a weapon in its armoury of self-defence or as an arm of justice.  After the capture and murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, from just a few weeks after the massacre in 1972 until 1988, MOSSAD hunted down and killed the Black September and PLO perpetrators living in different countries.  Ehud Barak, Prime Minister from 1999-2001, a former member of the elite unit involved in finding and killing remaining perpetrators resident in Beirut, was open about the wider Operation Wrath of God.  Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich tells the tale omitting the killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Black September leader.  The film evoked sympathy for the MOSSAD agents, their bravery and the consequences in their private lives.
  
Assassination is liable to drift out of hand.  Massively armed Israel, surrounded by a threatening and belligerent Muslim world, has stretched the justification of self-defence to its limits and beyond.  A major escalation was the targeted killing of civilians in Iran during 2010-2012.   The deaths of particle physicist Professor Masoud Ali-Mohammedi in 2010 and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 2012, expert in uranium enrichment, and other scientists, were attributed to MOSSAD assets in Tehran.   Years away from being able to assemble a nuclear warhead, were these Iranians an immediate threat to the security of Israel, a nuclear power?  In 2015 Iran signed an international treaty intended to limit the enrichment of uranium needed to develop a nuclear weapon. Israel – and Saudi Arabia - opposed the treaty. 

After the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, in April 2024, a car was bombed in Gaza killing three sons and four grandchildren of Ismail Haniyeh, Chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau.  In July 2024 whilst in Tehran attending the inauguration of the new Iranian President Mahmoud Pezeshkian, Haniyeh himself was assassinated.   Haniyeh, not by any normal understanding of the words ‘a moderate’ was considered a potentially pragmatic negotiator during prolonged ceasefire negotiations with Israel - unlike Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ hardline military leader, who planned and executed the 7 October massacres and who is now its uncontested dominant voice.    Many observers believe the massacres were, in part, Sinwar’s deliberate provocation to thwart any normalisation of relations between Israel and key Arab States.  And many in Israel have come to believe Netanyahu’s order to assassinate Haniyeh as, in part, aimed at aborting negotiations and prolonging the war allowing him to continue as Prime Minister and avoid an Israeli court room.
 
There are many difficulties in attempting to outlaw or even govern assassinations in an agreed, effective ethical regulatory framework, not least that killing by drones, guided by a hand-held device, seems remarkably like playing a computer game.  The ethics of ‘targeted killing’, how broadly to define criteria by which such actions might be judged legitimate or illegitimate, such as ‘in military settings’ or ‘for self-defence’ have been widely and eruditely discussed.  Do sporadic terrorist attacks create a ‘military setting’ or are they a policing matter?  The rise of asymmetric warfare involving extremist groups made such judgements even more difficult.   How immediate must the threat evoking self-defensive lethal action be?   No agreed answers.
​ 
Proliferation of assassinations is a symptom of a progressive decline in respect for both international law and national sovereignty on which the UN was built.  We need our international legal bodies whether the European Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, to slow or halt the dangerous erosion.
​ 

See TheArticle 11/09/2024  
 ​