The Human Right of Self-Defense

David B. Kopel,1
Paul Gallant 2
& Joanne D. Eisen 3

I. INTRODUCTION

"Any law, international or municipal, which prohibits recourse to force, is necessarily limited by the right of self-defense."4

Is there a human right to defend oneself against a violent attacker? Is there an individual right to arms under international law? Conversely, are governments guilty of human rights violations if they do not enact strict gun control laws?

The United Nations and some non-governmental organizations have declared that there is no human right to self-defense or to the possession of defensive arms. The UN and allied NGOs further declare that insufficiently restrictive firearms laws are themselves a human rights violation, so all governments must sharply restrict citizen firearms possession.


1. Research Director, Independence Institute, Golden, Colorado; Associate Policy Analyst, Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., http://www.davekopel.org . Author of The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? (1992). Coauthor of Gun Control and Gun Rights (2002). French, Spanish, and Portuguese translations of national constitutions and of English decisions written in Law French are by Kopel.


2. Senior Fellow, Independence Institute, Golden Colorado. http://www.independenceinstitute.org


3. Senior Fellow, Independence Institute, Golden, Colorado. Coauthor (with Kopel and Gallant) of numerous articles on international gun policy in publications such as the Notre Dame Law Review, Journal of Law, Economics & Policy, Texas Review of Law and Politics, Engage, UMKC Law Review, and Brown Journal of World Affairs.


4. In re Hirota and Others, 15 ANN. DIG. & REP. OF PUB. INT’L L. CASES 356, 364 (Int’l Mil.. Trib. for the Far East, 1948) (no. 118, Tokyo trial) (also stating that under the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a state is the initial judge of the necessity of self-defense against an impending attack, but not the final judge); see also YORAM DINSTEIN, WAR, AGGRESSION, AND SELF-DEFENSE 181 (2d ed. 1994) ("This postulate [from Hirota] may have always been true in regard to domestic law, and it is currently accurate also in respect of international law . . . . [T]he right of self-defence will never be abolished in the relations between flesh-and-blood human beings . . . . ")


Full article is published in the BYU LAW JOURNAL at:
http://www.davekopel.org/2A/LawRev/The-Human-Right-of-Self-Defense.pdf