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Introduction
Professor Nasu has a wealth of expertise in public international law, with many years of research and teaching experience in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has published extensively in the field of international conflict and security law. In particular, he has produced a world-class body of legal scholarship on military applications of advanced technology, as well as contemporary security challenges in the Indo-Pacific theatre.
Skills and Expertise
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2018 - December 2021
January 2016 - December 2017
January 2012 - December 2015
Education
February 2003 - December 2006
February 2002 - December 2002
April 2000 - March 2001
Publications
Publications (110)
Tensions have heightened in the Indo-Pacific, with the People's Republic of China engaging in aggressive behaviors in the South China Sea, confronting India in border disputes, and poising itself for a forcible unification of Taiwan in the midst of a great power competition with the United States. While the situation remains precarious, it is imper...
With the People’s Republic of China (PRC) poised to seize control over Taiwan, the prospect of forcible unification has heightened regional security concerns. While military and diplomatic efforts are underway to deter such a threat, much less attention has been drawn to legal strategies that Taiwan can employ to buttress its ability to defend itse...
With the growth of drones and their proven effectiveness in warfighting, parallel efforts have emerged to develop counter-drone capabilities. One such capability is electromagnetic interference such as radio jamming to disrupt or deny access to radio frequency signals or spoofing by transmitting false signals. Greater use and sophistication of coun...
A fundamental problem in the relationship between war and law has emerged, with two diverging approaches to conceptualizing how law applies to the conduct of hostilities: the operational application for the implementation of legal obligations during combat operations, on the one hand, and the adjudicative application for prosecution and reparation,...
Ronald Alcala and Hitoshi Nasu discuss the legal basis for conducting non-combatant evacuation operations (NEO), a type of military operation conducted in a foreign state’s territory, designed to protect and rescue the operating state’s nationals.
The legality of such operations has been debated for decades, and the potentially associated legal co...
Is legal uncertainty within the existing structure of international law truly responsible for a grey zone that hostile actors can exploit by employing hybrid tactics? The legal uncertainty arguably exists at the intersection between legal justifications required for resorting to an armed force against external forces in jus ad bellum and the applic...
This book explores how the concept of security interacts with the rigid framework of international law to test the hypothesis that the system of public order among states is regulated under the rule of law. The full text of the entire book is available at: https://westpointpress.com/security-in-international-law.
Although human security is not originally designed to be an integral part of the UN collective security system, the idea that the Security Council should address human security issues only emerged in the late 1990s. However, these attempts to incorporate the human security agenda into the practice of the Security Council within the framework of col...
Rocket emissions and debris from spacecraft falling out of orbit are having increasingly detrimental effects on global atmospheric chemistry. Improved monitoring and regulation are urgently needed to create an environmentally sustainable space industry.
https://rdcu.be/cTVAJ
With the development and greater availability of counter-space capabilities, satellites are becoming a prime target of military threats. However, the legal assessment for the targeting of a satellite requires careful analysis because of its impacts on terrestrial activities and the potential to affect the rights and interests of third parties when...
A dynamic shift in global power balance and the rapid pace of technological advances are likely to pose an existential threat to the United Nations (‘UN’) and its collective security system. The political impasse at the Security Council has undermined its ability to address international security crises in recent years. Proceeding with the assumpti...
This chapter explores Asia’s approach to achieving cyber security. It argues that cyber security has become a key priority for many Asia-Pacific States, although notes that achieving cyber security in this region is likely to be a complex and difficult task because of its political, economic and socio-cultural diversity. This chapter identifies cyb...
This article considers the readiness of international law to protect States from information operations that are launched as the means of disrupting government response to the spread of infectious diseases, such as COVID -19. It examines both the external- and internal-facing dynamics for international regulation of misinformation, with the focus o...
The progressive militarization of outer space presents a range of policy and legal challenges for NATO due to its reliance on space assets for operational effectiveness and the increased vulnerabilities of these assets. Indeed, dependence on space-based assets and services in the conduct of military operations has become something of an Achilles he...
This chapter discusses how, since the end of the Cold War, the global security agenda has not only widened but also deepened, moving the focus of security concerns away from the sovereign State to include other objects such as the environment, social groups, and regional institutions. The process of widening and deepening the global security agenda...
National authorities have responded with different regulatory solutions in attempts to minimise the adverse impact of fake news and associated information disorder. This article reviews three different regulatory approaches that have emerged in recent years—information correction, content removal or blocking, and criminal sanctions—and critically e...
Artificial Intelligence is a discipline of science and engineering of building intelligent machine capable of acting with an appropriate forethought to achieve a task in a complex environment. Its technological application in the context of armed conflict has been anticipated, which has caused significant scholarly and public debate primarily conce...
The traditional law of neutrality emerged to address the conflicting interests of belligerent and neutral states, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when maritime transport gained significance to the world's economies as the means of international commerce. The fundamental principles of impartiality and abstention from assi...
With the rapid advances in autonomous navigation and artificial intelligence technology, naval industries are edging closer to the development of unmanned maritime platforms with lethal autonomous capability—lethal autonomous maritime systems (LAMS). The emergence of LAMS as a sui generis hybrid weapon system will almost certainly generate disagree...
Asia-Pacific Perspectives on International Humanitarian Law - edited by Suzannah Linton November 2019
The idea of invisibility has long tantalized the human imagination. Once considered fantastical, recent advances have edged technology closer to the possibility of invisibility. On the battlefield, invisibility technology could be used to cloak soldiers and military equipment without restraining the mobility or manoeuvrability of troops and equipme...
The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) provides four different legal regimes for navigation of ships: innocent passage in the territorial sea or archipelagic waters of a coastal state, transit passage and overflight in straits used for international navigation, archipelagic sea lanes passage and overflight, and freedom of n...
Cambridge Core - Public International Law - The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution - by Hitoshi Nasu April 2019
New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace - edited by William H. Boothby December 2018
The regime of innocent passage is a well-established body of customary international law. However, when there is a dispute over sovereign entitlement to a territorial sea or its outer limit, the applicability and legal effect of the regime are brought into question. This article considers the applicability of the regime of innocent passage and its...
Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population – this is the least controversial aspect of the whole debate on the responsibility to protect (R2P) and forms the fundamental premise upon which the entire notion of R2P has been built. The notion of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ is not new as an idea. However, the political c...
The use of human degradation technology as a non-lethal means of violence has been prevalent from the early periods of human history. While non-lethal in design purpose, human degradation technologies have deleterious effects on the sensory-motor function of the human body, with a potentially lethal result depending on pre-existing medical conditio...
While many Asian nations advocate the need for a rules-based regional order, there are different visions of the rules-based regional order within or beyond the existing framework of international law. The advocacy for a rules-based regional order means very little when the rules themselves are the very reason why states are in dispute. The success...
This contribution to the Agora assesses a number of the key legal issues arising from the South China Sea (Award) from the perspective of maritime law enforcement activities. Initially, the paper summarises relevant aspects of the Award, before focussing on two distinct issues raised by the Philippines in the arbitration: a series of navigational i...
Japan's new security legislation, enacted on 30 September 2015 and came into force on 29 March 2016, has expanded the scope in which the Japanese Self-Defence Forces (sdf) personnel can use weapons while engaging in a peacekeeping mission. Among other changes, it authorises the sdf to use weapons in order to protect civilians (civilian protection m...
At the heart of the security tensions in the East China Sea and the South China Sea lies several territorial disputes over many different maritime features that spread across the region. The highly political nature of the territorial dispute – often involving strong national sentiment attached to those islands and other maritime features in dispute...
Introduction Peacekeeping has been the primary instrument of the United Nations (UN) in the pursuit of its objective to maintain international peace and security. It has evolved through the practice of UN organs, primarily the UN Security Council but also the UN General Assembly, in response to imperative security concerns of the time. This practic...
Australian Year Book of International Law
The complex matrix of territorial claims and counter-claims, and associated resource and maritime disputes, which characterizes
the tension in the South China Sea points to a deadlocked, and in some respects apparently intractable, dispute. This article
seeks to examine a series of rule-based alternative options aimed at finding or creating fractur...
Due to the continuing expansion of the notion of security, various national, regional and international institutions now find themselves addressing contemporary security issues. While institutions may evolve by adjusting themselves to new challenges, they can also fundamentally alter the intricate balance between security and current legal framewor...
Security is a dynamic, context-dependent concept that is inevitably shaped by social conditions and practices. The socio-political perception of security threats influences our security policies relevant to political decisions about the design of social institutions specifically addressing those security concerns. Security is traditionally understo...
Due to the continuing expansion of the notion of security, various national, regional and international institutions now find themselves addressing contemporary security issues. While institutions may evolve by adjusting themselves to new challenges, they can also fundamentally alter the intricate balance between security and current legal framewor...
With the increased awareness of national security concerns associated with unauthorized disclosure of State secrets, the legal protection of State secrets on national security grounds has assumed renewed significance, while raising ever growing concerns about its impact on freedom of information. Between these competing policy concerns lies a discr...
The disasters in Fukushima following 11 March 2011 have reminded us of the fragility of technological safety measures and the danger of lax implementation of safety regulations. The loss of confidence in the reliability of nuclear energy has quickly spread around the world, raising concerns about energy security. The rapid development of nanotechno...
The book outlines the regulatory environment for disaster prevention and management in broad social, economic and political context. The first half of the book focuses mainly on Japan, especially the �3-11� events: the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku area on 11 March 2011 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant radiation lea...
With a Foreword by Michael N. Schmitt, Charles H. Stockton Professor and Chairman, United States Naval War College.
Modern technological development has been both rapid and fundamentally transformative of the means and methods of warfare, and of the broader environment in which warfare is conducted. In many cases, technological development has bee...
The concept of the responsibility to protect, as agreed upon by world leaders in 2005, is too restrictive and qualifies their commitment to the responsibility to prevent. It is dubious whether the intensity and the character of the violence in East Timor and Kosovo in 1999 would have been enough to shift the responsibility to protect to the interna...
Catastrophic events are increasingly in the public eye, fuelling a burgeoning but complex field of interdisciplinary research and policy-making worldwide. Only in recent years, devastating natural disasters have included the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in the United States (US) in 2005, Cyclone Nargis in Burma (Myanmar) and the...
This article reviews the recent shift in Japan’s nanotechnology policy and regulation, analyzing policy documents and government guidelines as well as interviews with prominent scientists and government officials. The authors consider the potential role of nanotechnology in addressing Japan’s pressing energy security challenges after the Fukushima...
Nanotechnology is a rapidly evolving field of science cutting across many disciplines including engineering, quantum physics, optics, chemistry and biology, and typically involves manipulation of matter on the atomic and molecular level in the size range of 1-100 nm (1 nm = 10-9 m) in one or more external dimensions. It enables, for example, the in...
This introductory chapter outlines the general relationship between technological development and the conduct of warfare in the historical context. It then introduces the objective of the book, which is to critically examine the potential legal challenges arising from the use of new technologies in warfare, and future directions of legal developmen...
The project which led to this volume focused upon examining two issues: The primary legal challenges arising from the use of new technologies in warfare, most particularly with regard to foreseeable humanitarian impacts within the battlespace; and possible future directions of interpretation, application and progressive development in the law of ar...
Human security is a human- or people-centred and multi-sectoral approach to security, emphasizing the empowerment of people
to enhance their potential through concerted efforts to develop norms, processes and institutions that systematically address
insecurities. Since the UN Development Programme introduced the concept of human security into the p...
The principle of non-intervention remains a significant legal issue, particularly in Asia, for regional efforts to address a wide range of transnational security issues in the absence of a regional collective security mechanism. This article revisits the principle of non-intervention with a particular focus on the application and interpretation of...
The failure to prevent mass atrocities in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s spawned two pronged response – the emergence of the responsibility to protect concept as the overarching policy agenda, and the Security Council’s practice of mandating peacekeeping operations to protect civilians. This chapter examines the relationship between the two app...
Nano-Safety or Nano-Security? Reassessing Europe's Nanotechnology Regulation in the Context of International Security Law - Volume 3 Issue 3 - Hitoshi Nasu, Thomas Faunce
The introduction of nanotechnology into our civil life and warfare is expected to influence the application and interpretation of the existing rules of international humanitarian law. This article examines the challenges posed to international humanitarian law by the widespread use of nanotechnology in light of four basic rules of international hum...
The international rules on the protection of civilians during armed conflict can be divided into three groups: a) rules for protection of civilians in the conduct of military operations; b) rules for protection of civilians under the control of the adversary against violence or arbitrary acts; and c) rules for protection of civilians from the effec...
As technological advancement enables exploration and exploitation beyond territorial limits, security concerns have extended geographically and spatially beyond state borders to the high seas, outer space, the Arctic and Antarctica. Those new security frontiers are not immune from influence by the expanded notion of security, posing challenges to t...
There has been a gradual move towards recognising more diverse security issues as posing security threats to more diverse actors in broader frontiers. While the multidimensionality of security is now widely acknowledged in the discourse of security, its impacts on and challenges to international law are yet to be fully examined. Particularly, the e...
This article examines how operationalizing the 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) concept may assist in defining the scope of civilian protection mandates for peacekeepers, which are ambiguously restricted by three caveats - 'imminent threat of physical violence.' 'area of deployment' and 'capacilities.' It is argued that by restrictively interpreti...
Despite the centrality of the Security Council’s role in the responsibility to protect debate, little attention has been drawn so far to the relationship between the Security Council’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security and its role in implementing the responsibility to protect on behalf of the internatio...
The Asia-Pacific is known for having the least developed regional mechanisms for protecting human rights. This edited collection makes a timely and distinctive contribution to contemporary debates about building institutions for human rights protection in the Asia-Pacific region, in the wake of ASEAN’s establishment in 2009 of a sub-regional human...
The international trade law regime has been flourishing with the institutionalisation and judicialisation under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (‘WTO’). While some people applaud the development towards constitutionalisation, the inter-governmental nature of the legal regime, especially at the law making phase, has remained at the penu...
The development of nanotechnology for military application is an emerging area of research and development, the pace and extent of which has not been fully anticipated by international legal regulation. Nano-weapons are referred to here as objects and devices using nanotechnology or causing effects in nano-scale that are designed or used for harmin...
The responsibility to protect is a nascent, highly contentious concept. Although a restrictive understanding of the concept
was agreed upon by world leaders in 2005, the perspective of conflict prevention reveals the conceptual gap in terms of its
scope, stage, and strength, failing to bridge the gulf between rhetorical support for prevention and t...
This book is the first in a series examining how public law and international law intersect in five thematic areas of global significance: sanctions, global health, environment, movement of people and security. Until recently, international and public law have mainly overlapped in discussions on how international law is implemented domestically. Th...
The article discusses the Supreme Court’s judgment from 4 June 2008 on the constitutionality of Article 3 of the Japanese Nationality Act. The decision concerned a very technical question left out in the recent development of nationality law in Japan – whether the requirement of legitimation is discriminatory and unconstitutional against those chil...
With the controversial overseas deployment of Japanese Self-Defense Force to Iraq, Japan seems to be seizing the real opportunity to amend the famous war-renunciation provision - Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. The ambiguity inherent in Article 9 might have rendered itself unhelpful for testing the Government’s decisions. It also might have...
The Security Council’s failure to react when Israel initiated its third large-scale military incursion into southern Lebanon in July 2006 stands in contrast to the overall reform agenda towards a responsive and accountable Security Council. While the idea of ‘responsibility to protect’ increasingly gains recognition, the delay in reacting to this e...
The United Nations Scientific, Education, and Cultural Organization Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UDBHR) expresses in its title and substance a controversial linkage of two normative systems: international human rights
law and bioethics. The UDBHR has the status of what is known as a “nonbinding” declaration under public inte...
It is generally considered that the UN Security Council has been galvanised since the end of the Cold War. However, the existence and development of armed conflicts remain the reality in the international scene. Is the upsurge in instances of invoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter truly a sign of the invigoration of the Security Council’s authority...
This chapter addresses the question of how the supremacy of the Rule of Law can be sustained in relation to the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Since the 1990s, recourse to Chapter VII has become a commonplace and unchallenged practice of the Council, furnishing a wide range of flexible grounds for justifying its action...
There are different types of non-state entities with variations in international legal personality, ranging from international organizations to belligerents, entities sui generis such as Taiwan, and multinational corporations. Among them, the international legal status of non-state entities emerging from non-international armed conflicts has been a...
