Mine warfare at sea—some legal aspects of the future

Abstract

Abstract The paper addresses some of the problems that new weapon technology at sea are posing to traditional legal concepts, and to illustrate these, the sea mine has been taken as the topical weapon. One of the difficulties is that since the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, through the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Paris Treaty of 1928 renouncing war as an instrument of national policy up to the situation after the Charter of the United Nations, it is improbable that any nation will ever again declare war. In the absence of declared war, it is probably most helpful to categorize the threat or use of armed force as either a delict, a sanction, or self‐defense. The use of mines in any legal context gives rise to two fundamental questions: a. Is the mine a lawful weapon? b. If it is a lawful weapon what are the legal restraints on its use, if any? The paper asserts, inter alia, that the Hague Convention No VIII Relative to the Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact Mines does not prohibit the mine as then known, and that the legal status of mines as a weapon of war has not fundamentally changed since 1907.