Parliamentary Scrutiny of Counter-Terrorism Targeted Killings: Democratic Accountability Challenges of, and for, the Political Constitution

Bennett, Mark (2024) Parliamentary Scrutiny of Counter-Terrorism Targeted Killings: Democratic Accountability Challenges of, and for, the Political Constitution. Public Law, 2024 (Jan). pp. 45-69. ISSN 0033-3565

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Abstract

This article explores the challenges of parliamentary scrutiny of counter-terrorism “targeted killings” carried out by UK armed forces abroad. The article unfolds in three sections. The first section maps the contours of what can be seen to represent a contemporary UK counter-terrorism targeted killing “policy” in all but name. It discusses the controversial nature and extent of that “policy”, and the expansive (international) legal arguments that underpin it, such that it endorses the use of lethal force against suspected terrorists not only within but also outside active areas of armed conflict. The second section highlights two key democratic accountability challenges arising in this context. First, it outlines the limitations of existing parliamentary scrutiny arrangements currently organised around the so-called “War Powers Convention”, the use of drones and Special Forces—often the methods of choice for the carrying out of counter-terrorism targeted killings—crucially appearing to have been carved out of those arrangements. Second, it highlights the ways in which the UK Government emphasises the role of international law in “guiding” its contemporary approach to counter-terrorism targeted killings—what I describe as the effective “outsourcing” of the domestic legal basis for authorising such killings to the international legal framework. This, I argue, works to radically suppress very important questions about the authority structures—involving crucial political mechanisms of accountability—within which the legitimacy of such practices might otherwise be scrutinised in the domestic constitution. The final section of the article explores the broader, conceptual implications of these challenges for the UK’s “political constitution”. I argue that these challenges raise difficult questions from the perspective of political constitutionalism, for it is not clear that the ostensible “democratic” politics of (re)accommodating a counter-terrorism policy of targeted killing to domestic sites of accountability are truly of the sort embraced within that scholarship.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Business, Law and Criminology > School of Law and Criminology
Depositing User:	Mark Bennett
Date Deposited:	13 May 2024 10:46
Last Modified:	13 May 2024 10:46
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4163

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