Responsibility
According to Ducheine, in fact, “military forces must answer in all dimensions of war: in the physical dimension for physical war crimes such as torture and shootings against civilian targets, in the cognitive dimension they must answer, for example, for terrorist attacks , attacks on power plants and terrorization of the Ukrainian and therefore also digital population’.
Expiration date?
When asked whether it is legally tenable, Ducheine calls the step a “logical continuation of the law of war.” The law of war once started with land warfare rules, then air was added, and now a digital component.”
According to the professor, whether a cyber attack is a war crime depends on two things. “One is that warring parties are attacking digital civilian targets, service providers, for example, in part, software and services. Secondly, an attack on a military target causes so much collateral damage that it is disproportionate, and this too is a violation of the laws of war.’
Ukrainian officials have started gathering facts and compiling a file that will be sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, according to Ducheine, the trial could still take some time. ‘It takes a long time for prosecution to be instituted if you look at the wars in Bosnia. I suspect that the conflict must first be frozen or concluded for a long time and that there must be enough factual material to find an author. It’s still difficult.’
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