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The Conventional Weapons Convention: A modest but useful treaty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

W. J. Fenrick
W. J. Fenrick*
Affiliation:
Department of National Defence, Ottawa
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Extract

The author commenced an earlier study of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons (Conventional Weapons Convention) by quoting the late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht's remark: “If international law is, in some ways, the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law”. He then carried Lauterpacht's statement one stage further to suggest that the vanishing point of the law of war was most likely to be found in the body of law restricting the use of weapons. Shortly after writing these words, the author discovered that a colleague had also used the remarks of Sir Hersch and asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was the law of air warfare. More recently, the author read a paper by a younger colleague in which Sir Hersch was quoted once again, but this time it was asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was to be found in the body of law regulating nuclear weapons. The two lessons one might derive from this brief tale are that serious students of the law of war rarely have grandiose expectations for their discipline and that a good quotation is always reusable.

Type
Tenth Anniversary of the 1980 Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons
Information
International Review of the Red Cross (1961 - 1997) , Volume 30 , Issue 279 , December 1990 , pp. 498 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 1990

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Footnotes

*

The views expressed herein are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect either the policy or the opinion of the Canadian government.

References

1 Lauterpacht, H., “The problem of the Revision of the Law of War”, (1952), 29 British Yearbook of International Law (BYBIL), pp. 360, 382Google Scholar.

2 Spaight, J. M., War Rights on Land, London, 1911, pp. 76–77 Google Scholar.

3 Royse, M. W., Aerial Bombardment and the International Regulation of Warfare, New York, 1928, pp. 131–132 Google Scholar.

4 Lauterpacht, H., ed., Lassa Oppenheim's International Law , 7th ed., Longman, London, 1952, p. 340 Google Scholar and Greenspan, M., The Modern Law of Land Warfare, Los Angeles, 1959, pp. 360–362 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The US law of land warfare manual, Department of the Army Field Manual FM 27-10, at p. 18, Washington, 1956, indicates that the use of weapons employing fire is not of itself unlawful but such weapons should not be employed in such a way as to cause unnecessary suffering. The UK manual, The Law of War on Land, Part III of the Manual of Military Law, p. 41 London, 1958 indicates that the use of flame throwers and napalm bombs against personnel is unlawful “in so far as it is calculated to cause unnecessary suffering”.