Professor Ohlin began his talk with a discussion of the recent airstrike against an Afghanistan hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) by the United States military. To me, and probably many other audience members, the attack seemed to fit the category of according to an intuitive understanding of the term. One nation attacked a target in another nation, resulting in the injury and death of civilians. Furthermore, that target was a hospital, something that is intuitively thought of as a safe zone (which it actually is under international law). But then Professor Ohlin began to complicate things. This would be a running theme for the next hour.

As Professor Ohlin introduced the matter of collateral damage and proportionality into the discussion, it became clear this incident was not open-and-shut, at least in practice. Even though it just seems like the US committed a war crime with the attack, international law complicates things. After all, people are expected to die during wartime, including civilians. Nobody’s perfect. So laws were made to determine what is an “acceptable” and “proportionate” amount of collateral damage. A shrewd nation can then twist those rules to elude punishment for its misdeeds.

Another common theme within the talk was the difficulty of prosecuting a war criminal. As the International Criminal Court only includes so many nation states amongst its members, it can only judge individuals from certain parts of the world. The UN can be of assistance, but the veto power of the Security Council lets individual nations block any efforts that run contradictory to their personal interests. The message here, as with the talk on proportionality, is that common sense judgments on war crimes and other atrocities are not easily realized and that international laws meant to promote justice too frequently fall short of actualizing it.