By Marylin
Johnson Raisch*
Many questions have been raised about
process and procedure in international tribunals as well as in regional or
national courts dealing with difficult questions of international law. While
commercial law lends itself to open discussion of how parties may be able to
reach agreements about how their disputes may be resolved, where, as in the WTO
regime, there is an accepted path to enforceable dispute resolution, some areas
remain complex arenas of conceptual ambiguity. The law of war (known in much of
the literature as the Law of Armed Conflict, LOAC) in its situation alongside
International Humanitarian Law (IHL), constitutes one such lingering debate.
With continuing conflicts simmering and potentially destabilizing several parts
of the world, how are diverging perspectives to find a starting point?
