In this article I discuss one of the latest reports on the practice of drone warfare, the UN SRCT Drone Inquiry. I use the report to illustrate some of the specific forms of legal politics that surround drone warfare today. In the first place, I focus on the tension between the capacity of drones to target more precisely and the never-ending critique that drone warfare victimizes civilian populations. Secondly, I focus on the call for more objective legal rules that can be found in many debates on drone warfare.

In my response to Duff I focus mainly on the following two issues. Firstly, I examine what kind of a norm the presumption of innocence (PoI) really is and how it ontologically differs from other types of rules, principles, rationales, etc. My tentative conclusion is that a PoI does not suffice the requirement of being a dogmatic rule and, thus, has less weight than what Duff perhaps assumes.
Secondly, I examine what role the concept of innocence plays in the debate on fundamental (moral and legal) principles and the underlying rationales of a criminal law system. Although I am sympathetic to much of what Duff purports in his plea for civic trust and a parsimonious use of criminal law, I am reluctant to believe that it is really a broader version of a PoI that warrants the kind of morally decent criminal law system that he suggests normatively ought to be. In my view, most of what Duff wants to ascribe to the PoI can be derived from a principle of fairness which, in my view, is already embedded in the fundamentals of criminal law doctrine.

There are two fundamental problems with regard to the freedom of religion. The first concerns the content and scope of the right; the second, a possible unequal treatment between population groups. The first problem can only be dealt with by a preliminary analysis of the religious phenomenon, which precedes a legal definition. It turns out that there is a range of different types of religion, with on the one hand traditional forms of religion which are narrowly interwoven with the culture in question (all kinds of ‘cultural’ practices possessing a religious dimension), and on the other forms of religion which loosen to a considerable extent the ties between culture and religion. Evidently, the former types of religion cause problems in modern society. An additional problem is that freedom of religion as a modern basic right rests on a view of human being – including the idea of the inherent dignity and autonomy of the human person – which is at odds with the symbolic universe of traditional religion. The conclusion of the article is that in the modern pluralist society freedom of religion is on its way to becoming, or already has become, an unmanageable right. So the problems arising around this right (including that of unequal treatment) can only be solved in a pragmatic, not really satisfactory way. In that context, modern humanitarian standards should be observed in the implementation of the right of freedom of religion because fundamental human rights are connected with a specific concept of humanity.

This article draws on Hans Kelsen’s theory of democracy to argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the democratic legitimacy of either the European Union (EU) or the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The legitimacy problems from which the EU in general and the ECJ in particular are alleged to suffer seem to result mainly from our rigid adherence to the outdated conception of democracy as popular self-legislation. Because we tend to approach the Union’s political and judicial practice from the perspective of this democracy conception, we are not able to observe what is blindingly obvious, that is, the viability and persistence of both this mega-leviathan and the highest court thereof. It is, therefore, imperative that we modernize and adjust our conception of democracy in order to comprehend the new reality to which these bodies have given rise, rather than to call for ‘reforms’ in a futile attempt to bring this reality into accordance with our ancient preconceptions about what democratic governance ought to be. Kelsen is the democratic theorist whose work has enabled us to venture into that direction.