Martial law
With an escalation of violence in the late 1820s, Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law in November 1828—effectively providing legal immunity for killing Aboriginal people.
[10] In 2011, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa declared martial law during an anti-government uprising, granting authority to the police and military to crack down on protesters.
[15][16][17] The War Measures Act was a Parliament of Canada statute that allowed the government to assume sweeping emergency powers, stopping short of martial law, i.e., the military did not administer justice, which remained in the hands of the courts.
During the colonial era, martial law was proclaimed and applied in the territory of the Province of Quebec during the invasion of Canada by the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War in 1775–1776.
On 10 February 2011, during the uprising against his rule, Mubarak promised the deletion of the relevant constitutional article regarding the emergency law in an attempt to please the mass number of protesters that demanded him to resign.
[27][28][29] On 18 May 2003, during a military activity in Aceh, under the order of the president, Indonesian Army Chief imposed martial law for a period of six months to eliminate Acehnese separatists.
As he was preparing to leave the country, the Shah dissolved the military government and appointed Shapour Bakhtiar, a reformist critic of his rule, as the new prime minister on 4 January 1979.
[37] Permits from the military governor had to be procured to travel more than a given distance from a person's registered place of residence, and curfew, administrative detentions, and expulsions were common.
Furthermore, despite theoretical guarantee of full political rights, military government personnel frequently made threats against Arabs citizens if they did not vote in elections for the candidates favored by the authorities.
[39] Perhaps the most commemorated incidence of military brutality in this time period was the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, in which the Israel Border Police killed 48 people (19 men, 6 women and 23 children aged 8–17) as they were returning home from work in the evening.
The system, which has no apparent foundation in the constitution of Mauritius, enables the police to arrest without having to demonstrate reasonable suspicion that a crime has been carried out but simply on the submission of "provisional information" to the magistrate.
[44] As of 22 February 2023, Myanmar's military junta has declared martial law over a total of 50 townships in the regions of Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon States, Yangon and Mandalay.
However, three weeks later General Ayub—who had been openly questioning the authority of the government before the imposition of martial law—deposed Iskandar Mirza on 27 October 1958 and assumed the presidency that practically formalized the militarization of the political system in Pakistan.
Following widespread civil disorder, General Zia overthrew Bhutto and imposed martial law in its totality on 5 July 1977, in a bloodless coup d'état.
During the Second World War, President José P. Laurel placed the Philippines (then a client state of Imperial Japan) under martial law via Proclamation № 29, dated 21 September 1944 and enforced the following day at 09:00 PST.
The policy of martial law was initially well received, but it eventually proved unpopular as the military's human rights abuses (e.g. use of torture in intelligence gathering, forced disappearances), along with the decadence and excess of the Marcos family and their allies, had emerged.
Coupled with economic downturns, these factors fermented dissent in various sectors (e.g. the urban middle class) that crystallised with the assassination of jailed oppositionist Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983, and widespread fraud in the 1986 snap elections.
These eventually led to the 1986 People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos and forced him into exile in Hawaii where he died in 1989; his rival presidential candidate and Aquino's widow, Corazon, was installed as his successor.
There were rumours that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was planning to impose martial law to end military coup d'etat plots, general civilian dissatisfaction, and criticism of her legitimacy arising from the dubious results of the 2004 presidential elections.
Cited as one of the bloodiest incidents of political violence in Philippine history, the massacre was condemned worldwide as the worst loss of life of media professionals in one day.
Martial law was introduced in Polish People's Republic on 13 December 1981, by General Wojciech Jaruzelski to prevent the extraparliamentary opposition from gaining popularity and political power in the country.
It is viewed by some as a lesser evil that was necessary to stop a potential Soviet military intervention as the Warsaw Pact, which Poland signed in 1955, enabled other Eastern Bloc countries to intervene if they believed that communism was in danger.
[51] Following the 12·12 Military Insurrection of 12 December 1979, General Chun Doo-hwan launched the Coup d'état of May Seventeenth in 1980 and forced the Cabinet to extend martial law nationwide, which set off the Gwangju Uprising of 18 May 1980.
The second was established after the 1971 Turkish military memorandum for a short period of time to impose reforms to confront escalated domestic violence, which proved unsuccessful.
As a result of conflicts between far-left and far-right groups in Turkey growing, martial law was established for the third time in 1978, followed by the 1980 Turkish coup d'état that was kept in place until 1983.
[74] On 26 November 2018, lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada overwhelmingly backed President Petro Poroshenko's imposition of martial law along Ukraine's coastal regions and those bordering the Russian Federation and Transnistria, an unrecognized breakaway state of Moldova which has Russian troops stationed in its territory, in response to the firing upon and seizure of Ukrainian naval ships by Russia near the Crimean Peninsula a day earlier.
[77] In the United States, martial law has been declared for a state or other locality under various circumstances including after a direct foreign attack (Hawaii after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; New Orleans during the Battle of New Orleans); after a major disaster (Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906); and in response to chaos associated with protests and mob action (San Francisco during the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike; Montgomery, Alabama, following the mob actions against the Freedom Riders).
[79] Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
There have been many instances of the use of the military within the borders of the United States, such as during the Whiskey Rebellion and in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, but these acts are not tantamount to a declaration of martial law.
In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which, depending on the circumstances, can forbid U.S. military involvement in domestic law enforcement without congressional approval.(18 U.S.C.
