The ‘direct participation’ exception to the principle of distinction, found in Article 51(3) of Protocol I and Article 13(2) of Protocol II, embodies a long-recognized concept in the laws governing armed conflict. For centuries the broad notion that humanity demands the protection only of those citizens who are harmless has found expression in the rules and norms relating to war. This article traces the historical factors and trends which influenced the development of the ‘direct participation’ exception in its current form, revealing a tendency towards ‘humanizing’ the law in favour of civilians, notwithstanding their increased military value.

This essay explores how the drafters of international humanitarian law (IHL) incorporated the past into their work between 1860 and 2020, and how they approached time, memory and history as indicators for this view of the past. Its sources consist of the complete series of general conventional and customary IHL instruments as well as the leading commentaries on them. For the IHL view of time, the impact of legal principles on the perception of time is scrutinized. Balancing nonretroactivity against customary international law and the humanity principle broadens the temporal scope towards the past, while balancing legal forgetting against imprescriptibility and State succession broadens it towards the future. For the IHL view of memory, dead persons and cultural heritage are seen as crucial vectors. Attention to the fate of the dead has been a constant hallmark of IHL, while care for cultural heritage has an even longer pedigree. For the IHL view of history, the essay highlights that the International Committee of the Red Cross has consistently advocated State duties to the war dead and has organized an archival infrastructure to satisfy the need – later converted into a right – of families and society to search for the historical truth about them.

Furthermore, the responses of IHL drafters to five major historical challenges are examined. First, while in the realm of war crimes impunity prevailed for most of history, after World War II a system of war crimes trials was mounted, culminating in the International Criminal Court. Second, soul-searching about the atrocities of World War II, including the Holocaust, helped create Geneva Convention IV of 1949, which protects civilians in wartime. Third, the human rights idea was not fully embraced by IHL treaty drafters until 1968. Fourth, the IHL approach to civil wars was slow and incomplete, but its appearance in 1949 and coming of age in 1977 were breakthroughs nevertheless. Fifth, colonial conflicts were not recognized as international wars in 1949, when this could have had considerable impact, but only in 1977, when decolonization was largely over. In all cases, the responses to these historical challenges came after long delays. Clearly, the IHL view of the past has to be assessed on a transgenerational scale.

Questions of the applicability and application of international humanitarian law (IHL) to multinational forces are of central interest to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, also referred to as ‘the Alliance’ or ‘the Organisation’). Far from being incidental, multinational military coordination is the Organisation's raison d’être and the driving concept behind its methods, history and operations. Since the end of the Cold War, it has conducted a series of major multinational military operations – in and around the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere – in which questions of the application of IHL have inevitably arisen.

The applicability of international humanitarian law (IHL) to United Nations (UN) forces has long generated discussion. When peacekeepers have become engaged in hostilities of such a nature as to trigger the application of IHL (either via acts in self-defence, or in the course of carrying out a mandate as authorised by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations), questions have arisen as to whether they should be equally subject to the rules of IHL. Such questions arise as UN peacekeeping forces act on behalf of the international community and thus have a ‘just cause’, so to speak, to use force. Despite these questions, however, it now appears well settled that the distinction between jus ad bellum (the right to use force under public international law) and jus in bello (the law governing the conduct of hostilities) should be maintained, and that IHL applies in respect of UN peacekeeping operations whenever the conditions for its application are met. That said, questions regarding the conditions for the application of IHL, as well as its scope of application, continue to be relevant, particularly at a time when the Security Council is tasking UN operations with increasingly robust mandates.

The purpose of this article is to suggest some historical milestones for a retrospective reflection on the photographic archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). This collection is little used by researchers, although the 120,000 photographs which it contains have helped to forge the symbolism and identity of the institution and to document its operations in accordance with a memory preservation policy which gradually emerged in the course of the 20th century. The photographs shown in this article are divided into three main themes (the ICRC delegate, the context of action, suffering and the victims), in order to make it easier to discuss the key aspects of this tremendous visual heritage which looks at humanitarian action, its protagonists and its beneficiaries from an anthropological and ethnological point of view.

Progressive democratization, the presence of a military superpower and the dream of an international order maintained by an international authority do not enhance the appearance of conventional armed conflicts. However, the discovery of new frailties that can be exploited by aggressors, the proliferation of motives – including ideological motives – for waging war, and the spread of technologies that can be used in new forms of warfare have led to war and armed conflicts breaking out of their classic mould, becoming hybrid and going beyond their previous boundaries. The author argues for an updated polemology which endeavours to explain the mechanisms of these new types of warfare.

In the early hours of 17 December 1996, six delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross were assassinated in a brutal attack by gunmen at the ICRC hospital in Novye Atagi, near Grozny.

In late summer 1996, the ICRC had decided to open a field hospital in Chechnya because the main hospitals in Grozny had been seriously damaged, thus leaving large numbers of war-wounded without proper care.

Fifty years after the United Nations proclaimed its ambitious Universal Declaration of Human Rights, skeptics will have no trouble demonstrating that the international community's commitment to the document is shallow at best. The pretense was laid bare by the UN's inadequacy to stop genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, compounded by the institution's failure to conduct a thoroughgoing self-examination to determine the lessons of the debacle in Bosnia.

Many States have in the course of their history faced internal tension and strife, sometimes so serious as to threaten their fundamental interests. These situations, characterized as they are by acts of revolt and violence committed by more or less organized groups fighting either the authorities or amongst themselves, are distinct from those termed non-international armed conflicts, in which the violence is more intense. In order to bring these internal confrontations to an end and restore order, the authorities frequently make massive use of police force or even the armed forces. The inevitable result is a weakening of the rule of law, marked by serious, large-scale human rights violations causing widespread suffering among the population.

In many respects, observer status for the ICRC will place the practical co-operation that already existed between the institution and the United Nations on a stronger legal basis. It will also spare the ICRC the considerable drain on its resources that was necessary, when it had only consultative status, to bring its pragmatic inter arma caritas proposals before the United Nations.

From the outset, the central committees of the Societies for Relief to Military Wounded developed the habit of corresponding, either direct or through the International Committee. Was not the originality of the institution precisely that community of interests which united National Societies irrespective of frontiers?

Most of the founders of the earliest relief societies had taken part in the 1863 Geneva Conference which initiated the Red Cross movement. They knew each other personally and naturally kept in touch.

La cláusula de Martens forma parte del derecho de los conflictos armados desde que apareciera, por primera vez, en el Preámbulo del (II) Convenio de La Haya de 1899 relativo a las leyes y costumbres de la guerra terrestre:

«Mientras que se forma un Código más completo de las leyes de la guerra, las Altas Partes Contratantes juzgan oportuno declarar que, en los casos no comprendidos en las disposiciones reglamentarias adoptadas por ellas, las poblaciones y los beligerantes permanecen bajo la garantía y el régimen de los principios del Derecho de Gentes preconizados por los usos establecidos entre las naciones civilizadas, por las leyes de la humanidad y por las exigencias de la conciencia pública».

In Somalia, a group of young actors, musicians and scriptwriters are working on a play which is to be produced, filmed and distributed in the form of a video throughout the country. One scene shows a young militiaman boasting of how he has terrorized the population and the reaction of the woman he loves. She evokes the suffering caused by his conduct and refuses to marry a man who has disregarded the code of honour of his clan. This creative work contains a message for young militiamen about the effect of unbridled violence on both its victims and its perpetrators.

Dans le numéro d'août 1957 de la Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge a paru une étude consacrée aux réserves aux Conventions de Genève de 1949 pour la protection des victimes de la guerre. A cette époque, le nombre des Etats liés par les Conventions de Genève s'élevait à 66, et 18 d'entre eux avaient assorti leur participation de réserves. En 1965, une étude supplémental sur le même sujet a paru dans le numéro du mois de juillet de la même revue. A cette date, le nombre des Etats liés par les Conventions de Geneve de 1949 avait passé à 106, et le nombre de ceux qui avaient exprimé des réserves était de 20.

Entre 1927 et aujourd'hui, un demi siècle s'est écoulé. Pendant ce temps, l'Ordre s'est efforcé de s'adapter à l'évolution de la vie internationale et du droit des gens. En effet, les expériences faites lors de la première guerre mondiale oú il a pu apporter son aide aux blessés, malades, prisonniers et réfugiés, grêce à ses unités sanitaires, ses ambulances, ses trains, ses aéronefs, ses bateaux, lui ont permis de mettre son appareil de travail au niveau des besoins nouveaux. D'autre part, le dialogue intervenu entre lui et l'Eglise catholique au milieu du siècle s'est conclu par l'adoption de la formule émise par la Commission cardinalice suivant laquelle le Saint-Siège reconnaît la Souveraineté fonctionnelle de l'Ordre dans le domaine de son activité internationale humanitaire. Enfin, le nombre accru de ses membres, qui se recrutent aujourd'hui tout particulièrement parmi les personnalités qui, à la fois, pratiquent la vie spirituelle et sont proches des milieux ministériels, offre à l'Ordre une remarquable réserve d'hommes de pensée et d'action mobilisables en cas de nécessité.

It is known that the XXIst International Conference of the Red Cross voted a resolution (No. XVII) relative to the protection of the victims of non-international armed conflicts and by which it “asks the ICRC to devote special attention to this problem within the framework of the more general studies it has started to develop humanitarian law”. However, before the meeting at Istanbul, the author of the following article had already written a study on the subject entitled “Der Bürgerkrieg”, which is of topical interest and of which we now give extracts at some length in our own translation (Ed.).

L'étude Origines du comportement dans la guerre a pour objectif de contribuer à améliorer les politiques et les stratégies de communication du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge (CICR), dans le but de prévenir efficacement les violations du droit international humanitaire (DIH). Cet objectif s'articule autour d'une double interrogation:

a) Quels sont les facteurs qui influencent de manière décisive le comportement des combattants en situation de respecter ou de violer le DIH ?

b) Y a-t-il adéquation entre les stratégies de prévention développées par le CICR et les réponses apportées à la question ci-dessus ?

One of the main objectives of International Conferences of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which bring together Red Cross and Red Crescent institutions and the States party to the Geneva Conventions, is to promote respect for international humanitarian law during armed conflicts.