International humanitarian law — the rules governing the conduct of armed conflict. Hugo Grotius, a 17th-century Dutch lawyer, codified some of the first laws of war. The early Hague conventions were not about bleeding hearts trying to impose unwanted rules on armies, but about men intimately familiar with war agreeing to constraints that balanced military necessity with mercy.
Rules regulating violence have existed for millennia. The biblical injunction of "an eye for an eye" is not a demand for revenge but a law designed to define the limits of acceptable retaliation, with clear echoes in still-older Mesopotamian legal codes that also sought to prevent blood feuds from escalating. The oldest laws found by archaeologists, dating from 2112BC, were proclaimed by Ur-Namma, an ambitious military leader who had just toppled a warlord.
The 1949 Geneva conventions did not include a ban on indiscriminate area bombing, even with memories of Dresden and Nagasaki still fresh. Great powers have always resisted rules that might cramp their battle plans.
The 1977 additional protocols to the Geneva conventions aimed to ban area bombing of cities. America refused to ratify these. Britain ratified them with a legal reservation retaining the right to drop atom bombs and to carry out reprisal attacks on enemy civilians if British ones were indiscriminately attacked.
These laws were written with state-on-state wars in mind, in which soldiers would all wear uniforms and follow the same rules. Most modern wars involve militias that fight in civilian garb and then blend back into the population, making it hard for armies to honour the most basic law of war: that they differentiate between civilians and soldiers.
There is no global parliament to pass rules that reflect the will of 8bn people, nor a "globocop" to enforce them. Only one body, the UN Security Council, can authorise force to uphold international law, but it is constrained by the veto power of its five permanent members (America, Britain, China, France and Russia). The Security Council was set up in 1945 to give the UN the teeth that the League of Nations lacked. Franklin Roosevelt believed the world needed four policemen; France was an afterthought. These powers argued that any decision to use force would be political, and that since they would probably have to provide the troops, it should not be made without their consent. Smaller powers were given a choice: a UN with a veto or no UN at all.
Enforcement relies largely on countries consenting to be bound by the treaties they have signed. The spread of opt-outs has undermined humanitarian law, by formalising rules for thee but not me.
"Lawfare" is when countries or groups use courts to score vexatious political points. South Africa was accused of this when it rushed to file a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, only weeks after Hamas massacred Israeli civilians in October 2023.
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