Frauke Renz on the legal implications of Private military and security companies.

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photo credit: mashleymorgan via Flickr cc

The decade of counter-terrorism legal responses since 9/11 provides a suitable waypoint at which to take stock. Those terrorist attacks in the United States, followed by atrocities such as the Madrid train bombings of March 2004, and the July 2005 killings in London have profoundly altered and reshaped the priorities of many legal systems. The ‘new’ terrorism has even been perceived at times as threatening the lives of democratic nations, resulting in a declaration of ‘the war on terror’ by US President George W Bush.  The depth of the crisis is revealed by the fact that the US war on terror persists today in law and action. The label has fallen from favour and has narrowed in focus, but military action beyond the bounds of recognised international humanitarian law is palpable in the forms of military detention and trials at Guantánamo Bay and an increasing reliance on lethal force against the enemies of the state as delivered from unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). Though the United States is an outlier amongst Western states because of the dominance of its military response, almost all other jurisdictions have taken heed of the United Nations calls for action against terrorism by proliferating counter-terrorism laws. […]