Lawfare Archive: A Band-Aid for a Bomber: Is Medical Assistance to Terrorists Protected Under IHL?

From September 12, 2015: On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Benjamin Wittes sits down with Professor Gabriella Blum, professor at Harvard Law School, and Dustin Lewis, a senior researcher at Harvard Law Schools’ Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, to discuss their new report written with Naz Modirzadeh entitled Medical Care in Armed Conflict: IHL and State Responses to Terrorism. The conversation takes a look at whether we should consider medical care a form of illegitimate support to terrorists. Their argument? We shouldn't, because IHL lays down extensive protections for medical care, and those protections in many instances should also constrain domestic material support cases. Yet the authors make clear that in their view, there's also more to be done, as there are gaps and weaknesses in the protections afforded by IHL itself.