Logo: to the web site of the Swedish Defence University

Rapporten ”Förutsättningar för krisberedskap och totalförsvar i Sverige” ges ut årligen av Centrum för Totalförsvar och Samhällets Säkerhet (CTSS). Sedan 2018 har rapporten även inkluderat en fördjupande bilaga om rättsliga förutsättningar. Bilagan skapas i nära samarbete mellan CTSS och Centrum för operativ juridik och folkrätt som också finns på Försvarshögskolan. Bilagan har glädjande nog blivit efterfrågad av många och därför väljer vi nu att publicera den även i en pdf-version för enklare spridning. 

Rapporten tar upp begrepp och termer ur juridiskt perspektiv och går igenom samhällets omställning från fred till krig - den administrativa beredskapen. 

Contemporary disputes between states contain elements of psychological and information operations, intelligence operations and cyber operations as well as methods for physical use of force. Cyber operations may use, or contribute to, all of these different techniques and methods combined and can be focused on intelligence gathering, preparation of networks for future attacks, sabotage or on preventing access to information. States are also not alone as actors in cyberspace, non-state actors are continuously updating and reinforcing their abilities and capabilities and the dividing line between cyber operations that are a crime conducted by a non-state criminal and operations conducted by states have become increasingly blurred.

International law, and Swedish domestic law, is built up around two foundational paradigms for peace and war. The paradigms are founded on the concepts of statehood, sovereignty and security. Situations, especially threats to states, are to be sorted into either the paradigm for peace or the paradigm for war and are through the division into paradigms also regulated by separate legal frameworks. There is in law no acknowledged state in between.

This thesis explores the virtual borderlines of the paradigms for peace and war. It suggests that cyber operations is one development challenging the paradigms for peace and war. It further suggests that states are beginning to form their responses to cyber operations. States are defining cyberspace in terms of territory and sovereignty and they play on thresholds for breaches of sovereignty, interventions and use of force. They in essence structure and argue for a legal space in between the paradigms for peace and war.

The thesis also takes the findings from research conducted on international law and views the findings from a Swedish domestic law perspective. Sweden adheres to a strict division of threats and situations into paradigms for peace and war. There is no state of emergency in Swedish constitutional law, the paradigm for peace is applied fully until a situation is defined as war or danger of war. The question for law is how to make this bipolar system function where threats cannot be sorted into either peace or war anymore.

Svenska myndigheters hantering av Covid-19 har väckt uppmärksamhet, för att inte säga uppståndelse, på många håll. De missförstånd som ofrånkomligen uppstår när en situation i ett visst land ska analyseras av utomstående har inte blivit mindre av de konstitutionella och administrativa särdrag som präglar Sverige och som kan framstå som egendomliga i andra länder. I denna artikel presenterar vi några av de rättsliga åtgärder som vidtagits av lagstiftare, regering och myndigheter under pandemin och sätter dem i ett konstitutionellt och förvaltningskulturellt sammanhang. Artikeln inleds med en genomgång och analys av vissa ingripande rättsliga åtgärder av klassisk smittskyddskaraktär, exempelvis förbud mot folksamlingar, stängning av skolor och andra verksamheter och liknande. Däremot tar vi inte upp åtgärder av stödjande karaktär, exempelvis olika former av ekonomiskt stöd såsom permitteringsstöd, anstånd med skatter och dylikt. Efter detta går vi igenom vissa grundläggande skillnader mellan regelverken för totalförsvar och krisberedskap och beskriver krisberedskapssystemet något mer i detalj. Slutligen betraktar vi Covid-19 ur systemperspektivet och drar slutsatser inför framtiden.

Chapter 8 continues the exploration of issues raised by human enhancement technologies. Building on the discussion in the previous chapter, this contribution begins by examining the question of whether and under what circumstances we might consider that individuals who enhance their natural abilities might be considered something other than human – and what that might mean for their treatment under the law.  Biochemical enhancement, cybernetic technologies such as brain machine interfaces and advances in prosthetic technologies all have the capacity to alter and augment the human experience and raise interesting challenges for the law. This chapter looks specifically at the application of the laws of armed conflict (international humanitarian law) in relation to these techniques and the effects of human rights law in an age of enhanced humans – whether they be civilian or military personnel. Clear synergies also exist with the discussions in Chapter 13 on brain-machine interfaces. Attention is given in the final section to questions as to the adequacy of the current rights frameworks and as to the distinction between national and international systems.

Against the background of a significant number of compliance mechanisms that the law of armed conflict (LoAC) provides for, on the one hand, and the fact that violations remain a pervasive feature of contemporary armed conflict, on the other, the present chapter examines five distinct compliance-related clusters. It begins by a reminder of the various existent compliance mechanisms and a plea for an honest, inter-disciplinary stocktaking of their efficacy. This is followed by another plea, namely for contextualizing compliance and compliance mechanisms and for moderating the expectations as to what they can achieve as counterweights to the myriad of factors that are prevalent in armed conflicts and that cause violations of the LoAC. The chapter then proceeds with addressing three particular trends that pose particular challenges in relation to compliance: the prevalence of non-international armed conflicts; that the current discourse about compliance is dominated by a culture of repression rather than prevention; and that compliance is increasingly individualized at the expense of addressing the collective nature of the violence inherent in armed conflict as the context in which violations occur.

The "organization" of the non-State armed group and the "intensity" of the violence between it and its opponent(s) have emerged as the two key criteria to determine the temporal scope of the law of non-international armed conflict. These criteria have served to lift the fog of law in some important respects. Yet, several aspects of the temporal scope of the law of non-international armed conflict remain unsettled. This article addresses three of them, namely the assertion that the factors for ascertaining organization and intensity that have evolved in the jurisprudence of international criminal courts and tribunals are indicative rather than determinative, to whom the criterion of organization is to be applied, and whether the requisite level of intensity of armed violence can be cumulative when multiple organized armed groups are pitted against each other and government forces even though the armed violence that arises in the bilateral relations between two opposing parties does not reach the requisite level of intensity.

Contemporary armed conflicts are not only fought with physical means and methods. Increasingly, in order to achieve military and political objectives, parties to armed conflicts use communication activities to influence individuals. Armed groups such as ISIS use online propaganda to instil terror and recruit new fighters to their cause. In Syria and other conflict zones, medical personnel, aid workers and journalists are subjected to verbal threats and other types of intimidation. In the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, politicians are publicly discredited by having their pictures displayed on electronic billboards and being labelled as war criminals, while civilians are misled by false messages into assisting the opposing party with identifying targets for artillery fire.

At the same time, communication is also used to increase the security for civilians in armed conflict. For example, parties to armed conflicts have an obligation to issue warnings before launching attacks on military objectives that may affect the civilian population. Thus, although communication activities can be used to increase security for civilians in armed conflict, they may also cause physical and mental harm to civilians.

This prompts a question of law: Where does the boundary lie between prohibited and lawful use of communication activities as a means of influencing civilians in armed conflict? The purpose of this thesis is to answer this question. It sets out to examine what protection international humanitarian law provides civilians in armed conflict in relation to communication influence activities.

In the thesis, it is suggested that international humanitarian law contains a substantial—albeit fragmented—body of principles and provisions protecting civilians from harmful communication influence activities. It is further suggested that, in order to correctly define this protection, the material, personal, geographical and temporal scope of application of international humanitarian law must be properly taken into consideration.

Artikeln, som bygger på författarens doktorsavhandling, behandlar den humanitärrättsliga regleringen av hot, tvång, uppmaningar och andra typer av kommunikativa handlingar i väpnad konflikt.