Call for Papers: The Rights to Privacy and Data Protection in Times of Armed Conflict
Personal data is being collected and stored for military purposes during peacetime, before and during an armed conflict and in the post-conflict phase. While the law of armed conflict contains very few, if any, lex specialis rules on the requirements and conditions of lawful data processing, other regimes such as international human rights law continue to apply during armed conflict and contain specific provisions concerning the protection of information privacy and data integrity. This edited volume sets out to offer the first holistic account of the relationship between these governing bodies as they relate to the respect and protection of digital rights in wartime.
In the light of the technological advances in the fields of electronic surveillance, social engineering, predictive algorithms, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, automated processing, biometric analysis, and targeted hacking, this study is more relevant today than ever before. In this research we seek to explore the way these technologies and others are currently being developed and employed in military operations, and the existing international law regimes that apply to their development and deployment.
The outcome of the planned research is an edited volume which will be published by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) and launched during the 14th International Conference on Cyber conflict (CyCon) in May 2022. The book-length anthology will contain works from internationally renowned scholars as well as emerging voices. The project is jointly funded by NATO CCDCOE and the Indiana University Ostrom Workshop.
Submissions may address any aspect of the governance of the rights to privacy and data protection during times of armed conflict and we welcome theoretical, empirical, and doctrinal contributions. While not an exhaustive list, we would particularly appreciate contributions in the following areas:
1. Nature and Scope of Application: What role do the rights to privacy and data protection play in armed conflict? What doctrines ground their concurrent and extraterritorial application? Are digital rights the lex generalis? Can the legal obligations be identified within existing IHL treaty and customary law?
2. Relevant Actors: Does the application of these rights in wartime introduce legal obligations to non-state actors, and if so in what ways? Particularly, how do these rights apply in relations with military contractors, tech giants, internet service providers, cloud providers, thirdparty vendors and suppliers of software and hardware, armed groups (especially those that occupy territory), international fact-finding missions, courts and tribunals, journalists, and humanitarian actors.
3. Specific IHL Regimes:
a. Detainees, POWs, and Refugees: Legal obligations associated with surveillance of detainees, interrogations, access to information on detainees, and the transfer of them (see e.g. principle 11 of the Copenhagen principles or special surveillance of detainees under GCIII).
b. The Law of Occupation: Interpreting Article 43 of the Hague Regulations in the light of the human rights to privacy and data protection.
c. The Law of Peacekeeping: Legal obligations associated with the rights to privacy and data protection as they relate to de-mobilization, election monitoring, meditation and negotiation.
d. The Law of Targeting: What obligations may be derived from human rights to privacy and data protection to constrain certain types of attacks in cyberspace.
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