On May 16–17, 2016, the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (HLS PILAC), the International Committee of the Red Cross Regional Delegation for the United States and Canada, and the Stockton Center for the Study of International Law, U.S. Naval War College, convened a workshop at Harvard Law School titled “Global Battlefields: The Future of U.S. Detention under International Law.” Topics covered included:

• Legal basis and grounds for detention in non-international armed conflict;

• Procedural guarantees;

• Treatment (conditions of detention and interrogation);

• Disposition (transfer, release, or prosecution);

• The future of Guantánamo; and

• Detention by armed groups.

The workshop was designed to facilitate discussion on international law issues pertaining to U.S. detention practices and policies in armed conflict. Workshop participants included members of government, legal experts, practitioners, and scholars from a variety of countries.

A Workshop Report, published in International Law Studies in June 2017 [link], attempts to capture the main debates that arose in each session. In addition, analyses by certain participants were also subsequently published in International Law Studies:

• Yuval Shany, “A Human Rights Perspective to Global Battlefield Detention: Time to Reconsider Indefinite Detention” [link];

• Andrew Clapham, “Detention by Armed Groups under International Law” [link]; and

• Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Armed Conflict-Related Detention of Particularly Vulnerable Persons: Challenges and Possibilities” [link].

Image credit: U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan, “Detention Facility in Parwan,” Flickr.