Killing of Gen. Soleimani a blatant violation of international laws

In this article, the author is examining the legal basis in international law around the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani. The author's central argument is that this was an extra-judicial killing and must be recognised as such. 

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ROM a legal angle, the killing of General Soleimani was murder, plain and simple, that must receive international opprobrium. The USA has been killing terrorists all over the world. There is, however, a fundamental difference in the killing of a terrorist like Osama and that of General Soleimani. Osama was a non-state actor; General Soleimani was a state actor. This puts them on entirely different pedestals.

Article 51 of the UN Charter covers an individual or collective right to self-defence against armed attack. The US had used this article to justify taking action in Syria against members of the ISIS in 2014. The ISIS was, however, not a nation-state as the self-proclaimed Caliphate had no international recognition, no UN membership and no defined borders, thus giving it no right to protect its territory. In the case of Iraq, the Iraqi government had also formally requested help to fight the ISIS. That request provided a measure of legality for bombing ISIS targets in Iraq.

Killing a top-ranking serving military official of a nation-state, who enjoyed the full support of the political leadership of that country, is nothing but a crime. Had the US declared war on Iran, the killing would have been fair enough. Since they had not declared war, as Mary Ellen O'Connell, an expert in international law and the laws of war at the University of Notre Dame School of Law says, it is murder. She pointed out the killing could not be characterized as an act of self-defence because there was never a full-fledged and direct attack on the US by Iran.

The claim that General Soleimani was planning "imminent and sinister" attacks on US diplomats as well as military personnel has no value in law. It is just a claim sans any proof. Prof. Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School and an expert in international law also said that the available facts "do not seem to support" the assertion that the strike was an act of self-defence and concluded it was "legally tenuous under both domestic and international law."

Some people have sought to defend this crime on the ground that his Quds Force, a US-designated terrorist organization, has had directly armed and trained Iraq's powerful Shiite militias and other proxy groups in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria and Yemen. However, they forget that the Quds Force is an acknowledged unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is not some top-secret un-acknowledged band of sheep-dipped assassins. An attack on the head of the Quds Force, therefore, amounts to a violation of the sovereignty of Iran and is thus an act of war. Sadly, even in the case of a war, The Hague Conventions of 1907 and a protocol of the Geneva Convention in 1949 say, "It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by perfidy."