No consensus yet in Pakistan -- or is there?

Yet another meeting of parliamentarians has ended inconclusively in Pakistan's continued wrestling over whether to revive the military courts' jurisdiction over civilians. A few details here.

Or is there consensus? Here's a rather different take on today's meeting:

"The parliamentary leaders in the National Assembly from both the side[s] of aisle in the lower house of parliament on Tuesday gave an indication for a conditional consent to the extension in the military courts for the trial of terrorists following the government acceptance of the demand to form the parliament’s oversight committee to review the anti-terrorist laws. 

"However, the final decision on the question of extension in the military courts is expected to be taken in the next meeting of the parliamentary leaders with Speaker [of the] National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq on February 16."

Amnesty International report on Syria's military courts and prison hangings

Amnesty International has released a disturbing report on killings perpetrated in a Syrian prison. Excerpt:

The role of the Military Field Court 

Not one of the detainees condemned to hang at Saydnaya Prison is given anything that resembles an actual trial. Before they are hanged, victims undergo a perfunctory, one or two-minute procedure at a so-called Military Field Court. These proceedings are so summary and arbitrary that they cannot be considered to constitute a judicial process. Testimonies from former government officials, guards, judges and detainees helped Amnesty International shape a detailed picture of the farcical procedures that lead up to the hangings.

The New York Times reports here.

"A debate is raging in the UK about the effect of law on military operations"

Lawfare, a respected legal blog in the U.S., has this interesting post about "A [] raging [debate] in the UK about the effect of law on military operations."

Judicial imperialism is defeating the British armed forces. At least this is what the authors of a report recently published by the Policy Exchange--an influential British think tank--claim. Provocatively entitled Clearing the Fog of Law: Saving our Armed Forces from Defeat by Judicial Diktat, the report argues that the judicial extension of peacetime legal standards to the battlefield is harmful to operational effectiveness and calls upon the UK Government to reverse this trend. The report builds upon an earlier paper on the same topic published by the Policy Exchange in November 2013 (read here and see comments here, here and here). Benjamin Wittes linked to it here.

New chief judge named in Uruguay

Retired four-star Army general Daniel Castellá has been proposed as next president of the Uruguayan Military Supreme Court, according to this report (in Spanish).

The Yemen raid and some possible implications

Professors Steven J. Barela and Amos Guiora have a significant essay on Just Security with this title: Campaign Promises of War Crimes: Now a Stain on the Military. As a teaser, here's the lede:

As we try to figure out what happened in Yemen during the U.S. military raid on January 28th, there are a host of questions that remain unanswered. Here, we explore another very disturbing query: What do President [Donald J.] Trump’s campaign promises to commit war crimes mean for the men and women in uniform today?