Development of International humanitarian law

Development of international humanitarian law IPU notes unit I

1. Development of IHL

2. International Humanitarian Law (IHL)  is a compilation of rules that aim to mitigate the humanitarian consequences of armed conflict. It protects those who are not or are no longer engaged in hostilities and limits the means and techniques of warfare.

3. The International Humanitarian Law has established a variety of easily identifiable symbols that may be used to designate protected individuals, places, and items. The emblems are the red cross, the red crescent, and symbols indicating cultural property and civil defence infrastructure. The employment of various weapons, including explosive bullets, chemical and biological weapons, blinding laser weapons, and anti-personnel mines, is prohibited under the legislation.

4. The rules of conflict or fight, although, first documented in 1863 after the war of Solferino , it was slightly existed and practiced from the beginning of human being .    The battle of Solferino was fought in northern Italy on 24 June 1859. It was a decisive e pisode in the struggle for Italian unification and also a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern humanitarianism. It is at the origins of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and the Geneva Conventions.

5. Allied Franco-Sardinian troops, led by Emperor Napoleon III, faced off against Austrian soldiers at around three in the morning on the 24th. By six o'clock, the battle was in full swing. Bright sunshine bore down on the 300,000 soldiers, who shot, trampled, bayoneted and slit the throats of their enemies. After 15 hours of slaughter and bloodshed, around 6,000 men were dead and more than 35,000 were wounded or missing.

6. The earliest societies, the Papua, the Sumerians, Babylon, Persians, the Greek, and the Roman, in all societies had some rules of fighting and these rules were strictly followed by people. Every religion namely, Islam, Christian, Jesus, Hindu and Buddhist contains a handful of provisions on the law of armed conflict (LOAC). The scattered provisions of LOAC have been accumulated in the documents, the Lieber Code in 1863 and the first Geneva Convention in 1864. Later on many Conventions, Protocols, Declarations on Armed Conflicts (AC) have been adopted in various time depending on the nature of conflict and protection of the victims. Four Geneva Conventions in 1949, its three APs in 1977 and 2005 and the permanent International Criminal Court in 1998 have given a great success to the development of IHL. This article explores the evolution of IHL from the earliest societies to the modern age.

7. The medical services of the French and Sardinian armies were overwhelmed. Transportation for the wounded was practically non-existent, while food and water were scarce. In the church of Castiglione, the  Chiesa Maggiore  , a young Swiss man named Henry Dunant – who was in the area for business – did his best to care for the wounded and dying, helped by local women volunteers. They treated the men equally, regardless of what side they had fought on, inspiring the women to coin the phrase " tutti fratelli " (all brothers).

8. Evolution of ICRC. The battle of Solferino led Dunant to push for the creation of a neutral and impartial organization to protect and assist the war wounded (ICRC). He also suggested that voluntary relief societies should be established to care for the injured – an idea that would eventually lead to the formation of National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies . In addition, he proposed that an international principle be created to serve as the basis for these societies, an idea that developed into the Geneva Conventions, which turned 60 on 12 August 2009. 

9. Glimpse of ICRC 1.Contrary to popular belief, the ICRC is neither a non-governmental organisation (NGO) nor an international organisation . It isn't an inter-state body either. It is a private agency, governed by a committee of between 15 and 25 exclusively Swiss members, who set policy and decide on strategy.

10. 2. Today , the ICRC has roughly 11,500 employees worldwide, including 10,000 national staff and more than 1,300 expatriate delegates. 3.Up until the early 1990s, only Swiss citizens were allowed to serve as ICRC delegates abroad. Today, roughly half of the ICRC's international staff are non-Swiss.

11. Glimpse of ICRC 4.Around 90 per cent of the ICRC's funding comes from States, yet the organisation is independent from any government. 5. The ICRC works in 80 countries around the world and assists over 14.2 million people annually through water, sanitation and construction projects .6 In 2009, the organization visited almost half a million detainees in 78 countries and international courts to monitor their conditions of detention. 7. The ICRC reunited 1,025 children with their families last year, while almost 509,000 Red Cross messages were collected or distributed (including 143,000 messages exchanged between detainees and their families), enabling relatives separated by armed conflict to exchange news. 8.The ICRC is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions and the guardian of International Humanitarian Law, which outlines the rules of war. 9 The organisation's biggest operations include Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Pakistan, Somalia, Colombia, Yemen and Chad. 10. The ICRC's motto is Inter Arma Caritas (Amidst War, Charity  

12. The study of savage tribes existing in our own time gives some insight into the nature of primitive people at the dawn of society. In Papua, where such tribes would have maintained some rules such as warning in advance to the enemies, non-engaging into the war until both the parties are ready and suspending war for 15 days in case of death or serious injury of any soldie

13. The Sumerians treated war as a state governed by the law and it was started by a declaration of war and terminated by a peace treaty. The Code of Hammurabi by Hammurabi king of Babylon, (1728-1686 BC) ensured the protection of the weak from the oppressive hands of the rich and strong and made the provision of release of the hostages by ransom.

14. In the 7th century BC, King of the Persians, Cyrus I, ordered that the wounded soldiers would be treated and cared for like the own wounded soldiers. The killing of a surrendered adversary was absolutely prohibited to kill under the Indian epic Mahabharata (c. 400BC) and the Laws of Manu as they were unable to fight. It also forbade using certain weapons such as poisoned or burning arrows and ensured the protection of enemy property and the status of the prisoners of war  (Fleck & Bothe, 1999: p. 16) . The Greeks considered each one should have equal rights in the wars between the Greek city-states and in the war led by Alexander the Great who led the war against the Persians ensured respect for the life and personal dignity of war victims. The Romans also accorded the right to life to their prisoners of war  (Gill & Fleck, p. 16) . Although the earliest societies are considered as the uncivilized nations yet they have some principles for conducting the war against their own society or others and they would have strictly complied with those rules. The existence of law of war can be found in the ancient period, for example, the Papuan tribal groups, the Persians, the Sumerian, the Greeks, the Romans and so on, have their own customs of conducting war not like modern international humanitarian law.