Large companies can have both massively positive and massively negative impacts on communities, be it directly through their operations or indirectly through their influence on decision-makers. This is particularly true when business operations take place in conflict-affected or high-risk areas. Humanitarian organisations endeavouring to bring protection and/or assistance in these areas cannot, therefore, ignore these influential actors. Engagement with business actors – as well as with any other societal actor – should be framed within a clear rationale in order to deliver positive results. This article introduces the rationale that has been developed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and offers some examples of past engagement between the ICRC and business actors. It notes that occasions for humanitarian organisations to engage with business actors are likely to become more frequent in the coming years and argues that this trend, if properly managed, offers humanitarian organisations opportunities to leverage energies, know-how, and resources from the business sector for the benefit of the persons and communities that humanitarian organisations strive to protect and assist.

Le droit international humanitaire garantit la protection et l'assistance aux victimes de conflits armés, Cependant, hrsque des personnes deviennent victimes de violations du droit humanitaire, la protection conférée par cette branche du droit cesse de fait. En particulier, a priori elle offre aux victimes de violations graves peu de possibilités d'obtenir réparation, voire aucune.

Le droit international humanitaire diffère nettement sur ce point des tendances en droit international en la matière. Les droits de l'homme, branche de droit analogue mais distincte, définissent clairement le droit des victimes d'obtenir réparation en cas de violation des droits fondamentaux, Depuis peu, le Statut de Rome de la Cour pénale internationale autorise la Cour à déterminer dans sa decision l'ampleur du dommage, de la perte ou du préjudice causé aux victimes et à lew accorder une réparation. En revanche, le droit humanitaire ne garantit pas expressément le droit à un remède juridique aux victimes de violations.

Cet article examine les moyens juridiques mis à la disposition des victimes de violations du droit international humanitaire par le droit interne et le droit international pour qu'elles fassent respecter lews droits fondamentaux. II étudie la question de savoir si les victimes ont droit à un remède et dans quelle mesure elles peuvent faire valoir ce droit. Une brève étude des pratiques nationale et internationale tendrait ainsi à prouver que, s'il n'y a guère de doute sur le fait que les victimes jouissent de droits au titre du droit international humanitaire, ces droits ne semblent toutefois pas justiciable et ne peuvent donc que difficilement donner lieu à un remède.

The States which have accepted international treaties on the law of war are bound “to respect and to ensure respect for these treaties in all circumstances”.

This general principle, stated in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, has to be put into practice. For that reason, the States “undertake, in time of peace as in time of war, to disseminate the text of the treaties as widely as possible and, in particular, to include the study thereof in their programmes of military and, if possible, civil intruction, so that the principles thereof may become known to the entire population, in particular to the armed forces”.

The use of torture by the US armed forces and the CIA was not limited to “a few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib but encompassed a broader range of practices, including rendition to third countries and secret “black sites”, that the US administration deemed permissible under US and international law. This article explores the various legal avenues pursued by the administration to justify and maintain its coercive interrogation programme, and the response by Congress and the courts. Much of the public debate concerned defining and redefining torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. While US laws defining torture have moved closer to international standards, they have also effectively shut out those seeking redress for mistreatment from bringing their cases before the courts and protect those responsible from prosecution.

As humanitarian organizations become more active in the digital domain and reliant upon new technologies, they evolve from simple bystanders to full-fledged stakeholders in cyberspace, able to build on the advantages of new technologies but also vulnerable to adverse cyber operations that can impact their capacity to protect and assist people affected by armed conflict or other situations of violence. The recent hack of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement's Restoring Family Links network tools, potentially exposing the personal data of half a million vulnerable individuals to unauthorized access by unknown hackers, is a stark reminder that this is not just a theoretical risk but a very real one.1

The 2020 cyber operation affecting SolarWinds, a major US information technology company, demonstrated the chaos that a hack can cause by targeting digital supply chain components. What does the hack mean for the humanitarian cyberspace, and what can we learn from it? In this article, Massimo Marelli, Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross's Data Protection Office, draws out some possible lessons and considers the way forward by drawing on the notion of “digital sovereignty”.

The humanitarian mission maintains its ultimate objective of preventing and alleviating human suffering in situations of extreme crisis. In a different vein from the main subject of this edition- the future of humanitarian action – and using the power of images, Paul Bouvier, ICRC Senior Medical Advisor, brings us back exactly two centuries, to the ‘Peninsular War’ between French, Spanish and British, among the fiercest of the Napoleonic Wars.

The artist Francisco de Goya produced a series of etched plates known as The Disasters of War, which offered a hitherto uncommon view of war. By showing the horror and devastation of armed violence, the resulting dehumanization, and the distress and suffering of the victims, he denounced the consequences of war and famine and the ensuing political repression. Goya's lucid, compassionate, yet uncompromising depictions of war and its consequences are not only unique but also highly relevant today. His work is also an outcry and a plea for acts of humanity in the turmoil of armed violence, and anticipates the initiative that Henry Dunant would be prompted to take sixty years later, in Solferino. In a way, Goya announced Dunant.

Walking us through a selection of Goya's sketches, Paul Bouvier looks at victims, perpetrators, and eye-witnesses, and discusses how these images relate to the contemporary experience of humanitarian workers faced with the extreme violence of war. The author decrypts Goya’s sketches and relates them to the essence of humanitarian action as a response to human suffering.

In the foreseeable future, it is more than likely that the types, dimensions, and dynamics of crisis drivers will increase dramatically, in some instances exponentially. While a growing number of organizations with humanitarian roles and responsibilities sense that such changes are afoot, few have looked at how these might fundamentally affect not only what they do but also how they do it. This article suggests that it is time for humanitarian organizations to look far more systematically at the transformational factors that will increase disaster vulnerabilities around the world and also the opportunities that exist to mitigate them. The article notes that some of the most transformative factors affecting humanitarian action will be the result of new political structures in the post-Western hegemonic world and the growing political centrality of humanitarian crises. The consequences of these and other transformative factors mean that those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities will have to be far more anticipatory and adaptive than is the case today. They will have to pay far greater attention to innovation and innovative practices and significantly expand the ways in which and with whom they collaborate.

In the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe, each army used a different colour to mark its medical services: Austria a white flag, France a red one, Spain yellow, others black. Sometimes, the emblems varied from one corps of troops to another. Moreover, the carts used to transport the wounded bore no particular markings to distinguish them from the other army service vehicles, and there was no means of identifying members of the medical corps at a distance.

On 9 December 1994 the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus the Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel. In so doing it completed a process of codification and progressive development of international law at an unusually fast pace, considering that the Ad Hoc Committee entrusted by the 48th General Assembly (1993) with drafting the Convention took less than nine months to complete its task.

Legal controversies and disagreements have arisen about the timing and duration of numerous contemporary armed conflicts, not least regarding how to discern precisely when those conflicts began and when they ended (if indeed they have ended). The existence of several long-running conflicts – some stretching across decades – and the corresponding suffering that they entail accentuate the stakes of these debates. To help shed light on some select aspects of the duration of contemporary wars, this article analyzes two sets of legal issues: first, the notion of “protracted armed conflict” as formulated in a war-crimes-related provision of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and second, the rules, principles and standards laid down in international humanitarian law and international criminal law pertaining to when armed conflicts have come to an end. The upshot of the analysis is that under existing international law, there is no general category of “protracted armed conflict”; that the question of whether to pursue such a category raises numerous challenges; and that several dimensions of the law concerning the end of armed conflict are unsettled.

While armed conflicts are principally governed by international humanitarian law (IHL), activities of members of non-State armed groups and their affiliates may also qualify as terrorist offences. After explaining why the concurrent application of IHL and criminal law instruments on terrorism causes friction, this article analyzes the chief mechanism for dissipating this friction: a clause excluding activities governed by IHL from the scope of criminal law instruments on terrorism. Such armed conflict exclusion clauses exist at the international, regional and national level. This article explains how an exclusion clause can best avoid friction between IHL and criminal law instruments on terrorism.

This article analyzes the evolution in international law of the obligation to search for and return the remains of forcibly disappeared and missing persons. Receiving the remains of forcibly disappeared and missing persons is one of the primary needs of their families, who bring the issue to international courts and non-judicial mechanisms. This obligation has been incrementally recognized and developed by different human rights courts, which have included the obligation to search for and return the remains of disappeared persons in their remedies. In parallel to the development of the obligation by international courts, the international community has begun to become more involved in assisting in return of the remains of forcibly disappeared and missing persons to their families.

Despite the general consistency in the treatment of international humanitarian law by international courts and tribunals, recent decisions have seen significant disagreement regarding the scope of indirect responsibility for individuals and States for the provision of aid or assistance to non-State actors that perpetrate war crimes. The divisions at the international criminal tribunals with regard to the “specific direction” element of aiding and abetting are reminiscent of the divergence between the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on the question of State responsibility for supporting or assisting non-State actors that engage in violations of international law. This article analyzes this jurisprudence on individual and State responsibility for the provision of support to non-State actors that breach international humanitarian law, and considers the interaction and interrelationship between these related but distinct forms of responsibility.

The special significance of the red cross and red crescent emblems as internationally agreed symbols of protection and neutrality in armed conflict will be diluted if these emblems, or signs closely resembling them, are used randomly or for diffuse purposes in time of peace. In countries like the United Kingdom which for the most part have been spared armed conflict for the past 40 years, the red cross emblem has frequently become closely identified with first aid and with general health or medical care, its primary and unique meaning during armed conflict often being forgotten or unknown. For this reason it is perhaps particularly important for National Societies in such countries to help the authorities monitor unauthorised uses or misuses of the emblems, and the role of National Societies in this respect has been recognised under the 1986 International Statutes of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (Article 3 [2] thereof). In addition, dissemination activities can help to enhance understanding of the purpose of the emblems. This short article will discuss practical aspects of the monitoring role of the British Red Cross Society.

Commentaire de la Section VI, chapitre II — Représentants des prisonniers de guerre — de la Convention de Genève relative au traitement des prisonniers de guerre du 12 août 1949.

Au début de l'année 1918, alors que les dernières découvertes de la science et de la technique avaient perfectionné à l'extrême les engins de guerre et étendu au delà de toute prévision les possibilités de destruction, le Comité International de la Croix-Rouge lançait aux belligérants un appel où se trouvait le passage suivant:

«…Bien loin d'atténuer les maux qu'entraîne la guerre, on peut dire que les progrès de la science dans l'aéronautique, la balistique ou la chimie, n'ont fait qu'en aggraver les souffrances et surtout les étendre à toute la population en sorte que la guerre ne sera bientôt plus qu'une œuvre de destruction générale et sans merci.