In This contribution to the second edition of Dieter Fleck's The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Paul J. Conderman and I provide a detailed account of the exercise of criminal and administrative jurisdiction over visiting forces. The chapter focuses primarily on the NATO Status of Forces Agreement and the United Nations Model SOFA, but also addresses customary international law.
For a couple of years, I have contributed to the NATO Legal Advisors Course at NATO School Oberammergau. In the past, I spoke about the European Union's practice in the field of status of forces agreements and the application of the rules of international responsibility to NATO. This year, my brief was to place the NATO Status of Forces Agreement of 1951 into its broader context by providing an overview of the legal framework governing the status of foreign armed forces in international law. In doing so, my aim was to dispell two persisent myths: first, that the so-called 'law of the flag' principle represents the traditional position of international law in this area and, second, that in the absence of status of forces agreements, soldiers enjoy the same legal position as tourists. In this post, I briefly explain why both of these assumptions are wrong.
Seminar at City Law School
On 26 January 2012, I contributed to an online seminar on Regulating the Conduct of Military Personnel in Peace Operations, hosted by the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University. Repeated reports about human rights abuses committed by members of peace support operations have raised important questions about the legal framework applicable to peace operations and the need to hold the perpetrators of such abuses to account. My contribution focused on the role of status of forces agreements in this context.
In this short contribution to the NATO Legal Gazette, I examine the impact the NATO SOFA has had over the past six decades, in particular its possible contribution to the formation of rules of customary international law.
In this second contribution to the NATO Legal Gazette, I provide an overview of the status of forces agreements concluded by the EU and its Member States in the context of European security and defence cooperation
Conference in Tallinn celebrating the 60th anniversary of the NATO SOFA
Academy sponsored research project on visiting armed forces
This article examines the key provisions of the EU SOFA, an international agreement concluded between the Member States of the EU to regulate the legal status of their armed forces.
