A/76/136 the permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council recognised this in the 2013 and 2015 reports of the UN Group of Governmental Experts on the use of Information Communications Technologies in the Context of International Security (UNGGE), as adopted by the UN General Assembly. Australia also acknowledged that activities conducted in cyberspace raise new challenges for how international law applies. To deepen understandings and set clear expectations, Australia encourages states to be transparent in how they interpret existing international law as it applies to state conduct in cyberspace. The Strategy, and this supplement, form part of Australia’s ongoing effort to make its views on the applicability of international law public. The law on the use of force (jus ad bellum) and the principle of non-intervention The United Nations Charter (Charter) and associated rules of customary international law apply to activities conducted in cyberspace. Article 2(3) of the Charter requires states to seek the peaceful settlement of disputes and Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force by a state against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state, or in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the UN. In the Strategy, Australia made clear that these obligations – and the UN Charter in its entirety, including those obligations, apply in cyberspace as they do in the physical realm. A use of force will be lawful when the territorial state consents, it is authorised by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter or when it is taken pursuant to a state’s inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in response to an armed attack, as recognised in Article 51 of the Charter. Australia considers that the thresholds and limitations governing the exercise of self-defence under Article 51 apply in respect of cyber operations that constitute an armed attack and in respect of acts of self- defence that are carried out by cyber means. Thus if a cyber operation – alone or in combination with a physical operation – results in, or presents an imminent threat of, damage equivalent to a traditional armed attack, then the inherent right to self-defence is engaged. The rapidity of cyber attacks, as well as their potentially concealed and/or indiscriminate character, raises new challenges for the application of established principles. These challenges have been raised by Australia in explaining its position on the concept of imminence and the right of self-defence in the context of national security threats that have evolved as a result of technological advances (see Figure 1). FIGURE 1 – IMMINENCE AND CYBER OPERATIONS “[A] state may act in anticipatory self-defence against an armed attack when the attacker is clearly committed to launching an armed attack, in circumstances where the victim will lose its last opportunity to effectively defend itself unless it acts. This standard reflects the nature of contemporary threats, as well as the means of attack that hostile parties might deploy. Consider, for example, a threatened armed attack in the form of an offensive cyber operation (and, of course, when I say ‘armed attack’, I mean that term in the strict sense of Article 51 of the Charter). The cyber operation could cause large-scale loss of human life and damage to critical infrastructure. Such an attack might be launched in a split-second. Is it seriously to be suggested that a state has no right to take action before that split-second?” Attorney-General, Senator the Hon. George Brandis QC, University of Queensland, 11 April 2017 21-09670 15/142