Naz Modirzadeh

Doctors who provide medical assistance to people labeled terrorists are increasingly vulnerable to prosecution in the United States and other Western democracies, according to a law briefing by the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC). The 236-page report highlights the prosecution of an American physician who offered to work as an “on-call” doctor for wounded members of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia. The report also details the prosecution of a Peruvian doctor who cared for members of the Shining Path guerrillas, and of a physician who provided medical and surgical services to insurgents in Colombia...safeguards have been around since the establishment of the Red Cross in 1863, said Gabriella Blum, one of the report’s authors and the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School. But the new report’s authors contend that the law has been weakened by the war on terror and the United Nations Security Council’s antiterrorist directives...Blum, who is also the PILAC faculty director, co-authored the report with Dustin Lewis, program senior researcher, and Naz K. Modirzadeh, program director and lecturer on law.

When is a war not a war? Does it matter, when a bomb is dropped or a missile launched, whether it’s called “counterterrorism,” or “armed conflict,” or “hostilities”?...The administration has also said its actions are a legal response to the threat because Syria is "unwilling or unable" to fight the Islamic State itself. Naz Modirzadeh, founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, called that concept an example of "folk international law." Established law, she wrote Thursday on the Lawfare blog, includes no such distinction for violations of sovereignty.