A Study On The International Liability Of PMC And Related Subjects During Armed Conflicts

Private military service has come into being since the emergence of war and is gradually developed as the history evolves. In the recent years, various reports on the illegal actions of PMC during performance of the contract have attracted peoples'eyeballs. More and more PMCs come into existence after the Second World War, which were mostly uncovered by the international conventions existing then. And up to now, there exists not any legal document directly binding on the PMC. The development of PMC is ongoing all the time, but there is a grey zone in international humanitarian law regarding PMC since the international law provides no specific rules or regulations on it. The absence of such regulation on PMC will bring great threats to the international human rights protection and peace. In order to clarify who should be liable for the acts of the PMC personnel, we shall first determine the legal status of the PMC personnel under the circumstance of armed conflict. That is, to consider whether the PMC personnel are civilians or combatants. When those PMC personnel with the legal status of civilians breach the international law while providing contracting services, they shall be responsible for their own acts and bear corresponding international criminal liability. In addition, their acts can be deemed as the acts of relevant state for they are authorized by the government through contracts; therefore, the relevant state shall also be responsible for those acts. However, a few PMCs providing contracting services could be fall into the category of combatants when they meet the requirements of'other militias or volunteer corps'. Under such circumstance, it is undoubted that state shall be responsible for the acts of the PMCs. Besides, the state in which PMC established shall have the obligation to supervise and regulate the PMCs established under its sovereignty in accordance with the existing international law, therefore, when the PMCs breach international law due to its lack of supervision or regulation, the said state shall be responsible for such acts of the PMCs.