Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

I-Law Adv. – 2AC – PMC’s = No I-Law

PMC’s make international law credibility impossible

Avant 7 (Deborah, Prof of Polisci and Intl Affair and Director @ Institute for Global and International Studies, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2007_hr/070425-avant.pdf, AD: 6/23/10) jl

Because contractors are not subject to the chain of command, however, the reliability of their behavior (even given recent attempts to make them liable to the US Code of Military Justice) is not as well reinforced as troops. According to Colonel Gerald Schumacher, a retired Special Forces officer, chaotic conditions in Iraq have led to an almost cavalier attitude among private security personnel toward international law, “I don’t know how anyone can function in an insurgent environment and have any regard for the laws of warfare and the Geneva Conventions.”16
PMC’s are structurally impossible to regulate under I-Law

Gaston 8 (E.L, J.D., Harvard Law School, http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/HARVARDILJ_mercenarism.pdf, AD: 6/23/10) jl

The availability of advanced, independent security and military capabilities for hire enables states or nonstate actors to get around political or resource constraints that otherwise might limit the use of force. Moreover, since independent PMSCs are not considered part of a state’s armed forces or supporting militias under international humanitarian law (“IHL”), states have weak legal responsibility for the functions they outsource to PMSCs and for the conduct of individuals carrying those functions out. States therefore have few incentives to develop accountability and control mechanisms that would prevent or redress the type of misconduct and international law violations that have been associated with private military and security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I-Law Adv. – Solvency

Ruling on international law is key to PMC accountability

Ortiz 10 (Carlos, Prof at University of Sussex, http://www.privatemilitary.org/publications/ortiz_2004_regulating_private_military_companies.pdf, AD: 6/23/10) jl

Given the complex embedding of PMC entities within the larger business structures we have seen, regulation must be focussed on the actual PMC activities and be specified by reference to the service being outsourced. This approach, while not diminishing the tensions that delegating authority generates, allows governments to determine in which form and to which extent they enable private contractors access to the management of the monopoly of legitimate violence of the state. Nossal comments that the problems associated with regulating PMC’s nationally have 'led to the view that this activity could be more effectively regulated by international agreement than by a patchwork of national regulation' (Nossal, 2001: 468). But as long as states regard controlling the exercise of legitimate violence their prerogative, PMC regulation, too, will be devised and implemented at a national level. Given existing asymmetries of private military power across borders, changing attitudes towards the use of PMC’s, and different political cultures impinging upon the legislative process, international agreement must remain an ideal, while regulation at the national level is a pragmatic responsibility that governments can neglect, but not fail to recognise in the end. National regulation is therefore the inevitable starting point if the anti-mercenary conventions are no longer seen to be applicable.

I-Law Adv. – Impact – Human Rights

International law and norms effective at solving human rights abuses.

Fox 2000 (Gregory H. assistant professor of law at Chapman University School of Law, Law and Moral Action in World Politics, , pg.- 77-78)

It is no small irony that the international law of human rights was both a product and a casualty of the Cold War era. International reaction to the horrors of World War II produced a host of legal norms designed to protect individual citizens from abuse by their governments, as well as numerous institutions dedicated to their realization. At the same time, superpower rivalry ensured that concern for how governments treated their citizens took a back seat to geostrategic considerations. For the vast majority of international relations scholars it came as no surprise that human rights norms should promise so much yet deliver so little. For the ever optimistic international lawyer, however, the creation of norms and institutions dedicated to human rights was important in itself. Once the political climate became less polarized, it was hoped, these legal processes might begin to function as intended.

Since 1989 the legal optimists have been increasingly vindicated. Normatively, issues of human rights now arise in virtually every area of diplomacy. Institutionally, the United Nations, while still struggling to find a secure role in a statist international order, has been the primary vehicle for resolution of many recent international crises. Clearly governments continue to violate human rights on an unacceptable scale. But increasingly, those that do so are beginning to pay a tangible cost in what might be termed "legitimacy capital"-the capacity to participate as a full and equal member in international organizations, aid programs, and other international entitlements. For examples one need only to look to regimes that have been the subject of mandatory UN sanctions-South Africa, Libya, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Liberia, and the states of the former Yugoslavia. These states rank among the world's worst human rights

violators. The inability of such regimes to retreat behind claims of absolute territorial sovereignty has been endlessly analyzed and commented upon in recent years.

In many areas of human rights the end of the Cold War put to rest two important questions raised by realist skeptics: first, whether international concern for the welfare of individuals is appropriate, and second, the precise contours of the rights to be protected. The UN's decision to create war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda is emblematic of how controversy on these issues has receded. The tribunals were made possible only by virtue of the broad consensus supporting the norms allegedly violated. These are embodied, principally, in the Genocide Convention of 1948, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Nuremberg principles on crimes against humanity. Prosecutions before the tribunals are carried out on behalf of the international community as a whole. And the very existence of international criminal courts suggests that the legal standards to be applied have reached a level of specificity comparable to that of law in a domestic system: capable of being proven or disproved by evidence, applied by trial judges, and scrutinized on appeal.