HASSAN v. THE UNITED KINGDOM – JUDGMENT 21 diversification and expansion of international law” was adopted by the International Law Commission at its fifty-eighth session, in 2006. The Analytical Study of the Study Group on the same topic, dated 13 April 2006, (A/CN.4/L.682) stated at § 104: The example of the laws of war focuses on a case where the rule itself identifies the conditions in which it is to apply, namely the presence of an ‘armed conflict’. Owing to that condition, the rule appears more ‘special’ than if no such condition had been identified. To regard this as a situation of lex specialis draws attention to an important aspect of the operation of the principle. Even as it works so as to justify recourse to an exception, what is being set aside does not vanish altogether. The [International Court of Justice] was careful to point out that human rights law continued to apply within armed conflict. The exception - humanitarian law - only affected one (albeit important) aspect of it, namely the relative assessment of “arbitrariness”. Humanitarian law as lex specialis did not suggest that human rights were abolished in war. It did not function in a formal or absolute way but as an aspect of the pragmatics of the Court’s reasoning. However desirable it might be to discard the difference between peace and armed conflict, the exception that war continues to be to the normality of peace could not be simply overlooked when determining what standards should be used to judge behaviour in those (exceptional) circumstances. Legality of Nuclear Weapons was a ‘hard case’ to the extent that a choice had to be made by the [International Court of Justice] between different sets of rules none of which could fully extinguish the others. Lex specialis did hardly more than indicate that though it might have been desirable to apply only human rights, such a solution would have been too idealistic, bearing in mind the speciality and persistence of armed conflict. So the Court created a systemic view of the law in which the two sets of rules related to each other as today’s reality and tomorrow’s promise, with a view to the overriding need to ensure ‘the survival of a State’.” E. The House of Lords’ judgment in Al-Jedda 39. In their judgment of 12 December 2007 in the Al-Jedda case (R. (on the application of Al-Jedda) (FC) (Appellant) v Secretary of State for Defence (Respondent) [2007] UKHL 58), the majority of the House of Lords considered that Mr Al-Jedda’s internment was authorised by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1546. They further held that Article 103 of the United Nations Charter operated to give the United Kingdom’s obligations pursuant to that resolution primacy over its obligations under Article 5 of the Convention (see further Al-Jedda v. the United Kingdom [GC], no. 27021/08, §§ 18-22, ECHR 2011). Lord Bingham, however, made it clear that, despite this conclusion, Article 5 had some continued application: “39. Thus there is a clash between on the one hand a power or duty to detain exercisable on the express authority of the Security Council and, on the other, a fundamental human right which the UK has undertaken to secure to those (like the appellant) within its jurisdiction. How are these to be reconciled? There is in my opinion only one way in which they can be reconciled: by ruling that the UK may lawfully, where it is necessary for imperative reasons of security, exercise the power to detain authorised by UNSCR 1546 and successive resolutions, but must ensure that

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