International Law in Cyberspace: An Evaluation of the Tallinn Manuals

Year 2023, Issue: 73, 327 - 344, 24.11.2023

Ebru Oğurlu

https://doi.org/10.26650/annales.2023.73.0010

Abstract

While cyber technologies have been advancing since the late 1980s and early 1990s, cyberspace became one of the platforms in which interstate relations occur, ranging from politics and economics to war and conflicts as a result of the mainstreaming of broadband Internet access in the early 2000s. Previously imagined as a platform for free and open communication among people without any state controls or regulations, cyberspace has become one of the main topics of international politics over the last decade. However, laws and policies managing cyberspace have fallen behind the technological developments. Thus, the issue only started to gain the global attention it deserves when modest progress was observed in international law concerning the legal status of cyberspace and the relevant valid principles in the 2000s. State-led cyber operations against Estonia in 2008, Georgia in 2009, and Iran in 2010 supposedly played a significant role in transforming cyberspace into an area of national and international concern. Subsequently, various initiatives have emerged at the international level for adopting internationally recognized cyber rules and principles. Within the framework of Janssens and Wouters’ (2022) study Informal International Law-Making: A Way Around the Deadlock of International Humanitarian Law?, this work aims to discuss how and to what extent international law can be developed for application in cyberspace by focusing on the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Schmitt [Ed.], 2013) and the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Schmitt [Ed.], 2017), the most comprehensive, albeit non-binding, works published to date on the applicability of existing international law in cyberspace. Using a literature review as its method, the study presents the results of the main legal texts and academic studies and argues that even though the issue has only recently come to the fore as one of the newest areas of international legal systems, the specific rights and duties of states flowing from the age-old principles of international law (i.e., sovereignty, territoriality, and non-intervention) have not become obsolete in this domain.

Keywords

International Law, Cyberspace, Sovereignty, Territoriality, Non-Intervention, Tallinn Manual 2.0, Informal International Law-Making

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