Examining Legal Regimes to Combat Terrorism in Near East & South Asia

By Andrew Cochran

On July 22 and 23, I attended a conference co-hosted by the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University and the Inter-University Center for Legal Studies at the International Law Institute, titled, "Lifting the Fog of Law: Legal Regimes to Combat Terrorism in the Near East and South Asia” in Washington. The conference brought together 70 experts from the U.S., North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia came together to exchange views on the effectiveness of legal regimes in those regions as a foundation upon which to build national and international counter-terrorism efforts. Both hosting organizations are known for their objective analyses of and experience in CT policy, and we have co-sponsored numerous panels with the co-director of the Inter-University Center, Dr. Yonah Alexander (see a summary of our last such panel held in May). With their permission, I am posting a summary of the proceedings' main points:

"Multiple insights into the traditions for dealing with violent actors and the various national legal regimes under discussion resulted from the conference. These insights will be fully addressed in the edited volume that will result from this event. There were, however, some overarching issues that bear mentioning here.

a. Context Matters: In the international arena, law and legal frameworks are to a great extent the product of the cultural environment from which they originate; and they have evolved on different tracks over time in response to individual situations. It is a difficult task to reconcile differences in legal systems with such divergent origins and underlying rationales, even where interests are shared and common threats menace.

b. Remarkable Continuity: Despite this variation in legal and moral traditions, however, there is remarkable consistency across borders regarding what is being done in domestic legislation to combat political violence broadly and terrorism in particular. Regardless of how a given provision was expressed or justified in a particular state or tradition, acts of terrorism are outlawed on their own merits in all the nations examined at this conference and, one might argue, in virtually all jurisdictions able to make law and to make law binding.

c. National vice Transnational / Continuity vice Universality: This continuity, however, is difficult to translate into universally accepted rules when one leaves domestic settings and enters international ones. In the transnational environment, there is no authority that can make law or make law binding, at least not in the sense that we understand sovereign state authority. Adherence to rules and norms is voluntary and understanding of what is lawful or not has no essentially common cultural basis.

d. Questions Remain: While there is considerable agreement that war and war-like acts can and should be rule-governed, and that these rules can be agreed to and followed even in international settings like, for example, the law of armed conflict between states, this conference demonstrated that questions still remain about whether a government can fight terrorism effectively if it or its people politically agree with the goals of groups that violate the rules that govern violence and whether the methods used to achieve goals can be separated from the cause, from the goals themselves. There are no definitive answers to these questions but they must be addressed in order to further international cooperation to confront terrorism."

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