Breakfast Briefing with Cornelius Wiesener

Compulsory Military Service in Transition – Conscription under the European Convention on Human Rights

Abstract

Mandatory military service was on the retreat in Europe during much of the 1990s and the early 2000s. After the end of the Cold War, large conscript armies were considered unnecessary without a major threat from the East. They also seemed ill equipped for the type of overseas deployments that many states embarked on to address new and diverse security threats outside of Europe. As a result, many states abolished conscription; and those maintaining it chose to severely reduce the length of military service or its recruitment base. This tide has turned quite dramatically after the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, starting in 2014. Since then, many countries have reinstated conscription or consider in what form or shape it could be reintroduced or reformed, both in terms of pressing military needs and new social realities, including gender equality.

While a reinstatement or reform of conscription may in some cases require a constitutional amendment, this is not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle. A far greater challenge may, however, come from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which binds (almost) all states across Europe and has a significant constraining effect on their power to act and to legislate. The ECHR is thus an ideal benchmark for a cross-country study. Unfortunately, most comparative studies about conscription are outdated, largely published at a time when military service was in the process of being abolished. Moreover, the few legal studies that exist fail to comprehensively address the inherently coercive nature of conscription and the related challenges under human rights law. To fill this gap, Cornelius Wiesener will focus in his presentation on the following three, interrelated dimensions under the ECHR: peacetime conscription, wartime conscription, and draft equality/selection. They form the building blocks for a planned multi-year research project. 

About the Speaker

Cornelius Wiesener is a tenure-track assistant professor at iCourts and a member of the InterMil project, which conducts strategic research and provides research-based public-sector consultancy within the field of military studies.

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