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The volume under review is published in the series "The Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law", which draws upon the lectures given at the European University Institute in Florence within the Academy of European Law Summer School. It includes eight essays, most of which are authored by the lecturers in the session on the human rights law of the 2008 Academy of European Law Summer School. Their common denominator is the exploration, to a greater or lesser degree, of the interaction between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) and its functioning in practice.
The collection opens with an essay by Yuval Shany entitled "Human Rights and Humanitarian Law as Competing Legal Paradigms for Fighting Terror". The author illustrates how after the 11 September 2001 attacks there was a shift from what he calls the "law and order" paradigm, which considered terrorism simply as a criminal phenomenon, to what in his words is the "armed conflict" paradigm, according to which terrorism is "a threat equivalent in its magnitude to an inter-state war" (at 22). This shift had dramatic consequences for the respect for human rights in the fight against terrorism. Shany, however, points out that the situation is fluid: a mixed paradigm is emerging which takes human rights into due consideration. This paradigm was implicitly endorsed by the International Court of Justice in the Wall advisory opinion and, more recently, by the Israeli Supreme Court in various decisions, including that in the Targeted Killings case. In the author's view, however, it remains unclear whether the mixed paradigm will be able to impact on state practice.
The second essay is by Marco Sassòli and focuses on the role of IHL and IHRL in the allegedly new types of armed conflicts. Sassòli considers asymmetric conflicts, conflicts in...
