Melbourne Law School - Theses
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ItemHuman rights for the data society( 2022)In 2011, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon launched the UN Global Pulse, an initiative on digital data technologies. According to Ban, the Global Pulse would ‘bring the work of the United Nations fully into the digital age’. By the end of the decade, in 2020, Ban’s successor Antonio Guterres published the ‘Road map for digital co-operation’, in which Guterres declared that the international community stands at ‘new frontiers of technology and human rights’. The aim of the Road map was to co-ordinate activity across the UN system to address both opportunities and risks that Guterres identified at this frontier. The risks were that digital technologies might be used for ‘surveillance, repression, censorship and online harassment’. The opportunities were for digital technologies to ‘provide new means to advocate, defend and exercise human rights’. This thesis is concerned with the UN’s engagement with digital data technologies in its human rights work in the 2010s. During that decade, the UN has both embraced new technologies and attempted to regulate them. Much of the existing scholarship on the relationship between digital data technologies and human rights in the international sphere has mirrored the UN’s ‘opportunities’ and ‘risks’ framing. The question implicit in this scholarship is how to use human rights goals and norms to make the inevitable datafication of the world better. This sense of inevitability is reflected in the commonly used periodisation of ‘a digital age’, which suggests that there is a singular human world that moves from one technological age to another. In contrast to these approaches, this thesis focuses on how the UN’s work on digital data technologies and human rights might make and shape a particular world. I use ‘world’ in the sense of a normative and imaginative universe in which there is a shared common sense about what it is possible to do, and what ought to be done, and the material environment underpinning that common understanding. My argument is that the UN’s attempts to embrace and respond to digital data technologies are producing a world in which the biggest technology corporations and their data technologies are widely accepted as indispensable to the international human rights project. I call that world the data society. The UN does so through a series of technical projects during the 2010s that produce what one might call ‘datafied’ forms of human rights. In these emerging forms of human rights, core concepts and practices are understood by reference to or performed through digital data technologies. The central implication of this argument is that when human rights practitioners – at the UN and beyond – use datafied forms of human rights, they play a significant role in making the data society possible. By the same token, they also play a significant role in foreclosing alternative possibilities – of worlds in which human rights and digital data technologies might be imagined differently.
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ItemGoverning from Above: A History of Aerial Bombing and International Law( 2020)The advent of aircraft in the early twentieth century brought significant changes to human society, from transportation and infrastructure to surveillance and warfare. This technology provided a new way of seeing the world from above – an aerial perspective – with its assumptions and frames of understanding space, peoples and objects. In armed conflict, airplanes facilitated interventions in foreign places and attacks directed at cities and civilians, leading to significant changes to military strategy and to legal and political discourses on how wars should be pursued. This thesis studies how the rise of aerial bombing transformed the central concepts of international law of armed conflict. The focus is on the concepts of aerial territory, civilian population, military objectives, and the principle of proportionality. I argue that these core concepts of the laws of war emerged from or were substantially transformed by the emergence of aerial warfare. The thesis covers the period of 1899 to 1977. It begins with the first considerations by international lawyers of how international law should respond to the introduction airplanes in war and ends with the conclusion of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, where the concepts and ideas that had emerged in the preceding decades were codified. I argue that the central debates and paradoxes of the contemporary laws of war can be traced back to the ideological, material and institutional transformations that took place as a result of aerial bombing in the period between 1899-1977. This thesis aims to shed light on the early history of aerial bombing and international law, a period often forgotten or ignored in scholarship on the laws of war. It uncovers the politics and assumptions behind international humanitarian law in its relation to aerial bombing. I challenge the universality and assimilation of the core concepts of international humanitarian law, exposing how legal discourse has played a central role in the legitimation of aerial violence. The thesis explores what alternative views have been articulated in the past and what could be gained from grasping the possibilities and arguments put forward by international lawyers throughout the rise of air power. This historical inquiry has substantial repercussions for current debates on drone warfare, autonomous weapons and new military technologies, which it claims are the culmination of a much longer history of international humanitarian law embracing a view from above.
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Item'I will fight for freedom until I die': international humanitarian law, international human rights law and the grey zone of regulating violence in cities( 2020)This thesis argues that international human rights law and international humanitarian law do not adequately govern the conduct of violence in cities, including violent protests, riots and civil unrest. Specifically, it is theorised that situations of violence in cities fall into a "grey zone" of international law insofar as neither international humanitarian law nor international human rights law provide clear and specific rules governing the conduct of violence in these contexts. While international humanitarian law is the field of public international law best equipped to govern the use of force, including the use of certain kinds of weapons and the protection of civilians from violence, modern situations of urban violence often fall below international humanitarian law’s threshold of application for non-international armed conflicts. Consequently, it falls to the international law of human rights to govern these types of violence. However, international human rights law’s ability to be derogated from, lack of specificity regarding permissible and prohibited means of use of force, and general lack of applicability to non-state armed actors, often means that it has limited utility in regulating such situations and effectively protecting victims. Consequently, there is a clear impetus for a policy-oriented approach based on norms found in both international humanitarian law and international human rights law to protect those affected by urban violence. Specifically, this thesis proposes the development of a “Basic Principles” style document to seek to set standards for the use of force, by both state and non-state parties to violence in cities.