Legal Opinion on (the Neptune Spear Operation that led to) the Death of Bin Laden

Abstract

This thesis is organized in the form of a legal opinion on the lawfulness/legality of the Neptune Spear Operation, carried out by secretive US-JSOC Special Forces (Navy SEALS and DELTA Forces), with the aim to kill or capture Bin Laden. The first part, premised on the extraterritorial application of the human right to life, discusses possible grounds for the use of lethal force in law-enforcement context: kill in order to effectuate an arrest, to prevent escape, to prevent the commission of violence crime and to quench the threat to self and others; outside these strict conditions killing amounts to extra-judicial execution. The second part discusses basic issues of jus ad bellum , the international law framework regulating the resort to military force, such as whether an armed attack occurred to justify the exercise of national self-defence, whether there is permissibility for the use of defensive force against non-state actors liable as direct participants in armed attacks and whether consent from the territorial country is necessary in order not to encroach on its sovereignty. Finally, the third part, the largest, discusses the operation through the lens of international humanitarian law ( jus in bello ), analyzing whether the threshold for armed conflict had been crossed and whether the expansion of the theater-of-war/area-of-operations to Pakistan ensued, then it goes on assessing status (non-combatants and combatants), the principles regarding targeting in operational law and the specific means and methods-of-warfare used.