What Are the Geneva Conventions? Rules for the Conduct of War

The current framework consists of four treaties agreed in 1949, in the aftermath of a war that demonstrated the inadequacy of what came before, plus three later additional protocols. They are among the most widely ratified agreements in existence, accepted by every state in the world:

• •The first protects wounded and sick soldiers on land, along with medical personnel, chaplains, ambulances and hospitals, which must not be attacked and are marked with the red cross, red crescent or red crystal
• •The second extends the same protection to the wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea, including hospital ships
• •The third governs prisoners of war, setting out who qualifies, how they must be treated, what they may be required to do and that they must be released when active hostilities end
• •The fourth protects civilians in occupied territory and in the hands of an enemy power, which was the great omission of the earlier treaties and the direct response to the Second World War
• •Additional Protocols of 1977 extend protection in international and internal armed conflicts and codify the rules on conducting attacks; a 2005 protocol added the red crystal emblem

One provision appears identically in all four treaties and is often described as a convention in miniature. Common Article 3 applies to armed conflicts not of an international character, meaning civil wars and conflicts with non-state armed groups, which the rest of the framework was not written for, and it binds all parties including the non-state ones. It requires that anyone not taking active part in hostilities, including soldiers who have surrendered or been wounded, be treated humanely without discrimination, and it prohibits absolutely four things: violence to life and person including murder and torture, the taking of hostages, outrages upon personal dignity including humiliating treatment, and the passing of sentences without a proper court. Because most armed conflicts since 1949 have been internal rather than between states, this short article does a great deal of the practical work, and the International Court of Justice has described it as a minimum yardstick applicable in any conflict.

The conventions protect people who are out of the fight, and a separate body of rules governs how fighting may be conducted, historically called Hague law after the conferences of 1899 and 1907 and now largely merged with the Geneva framework through the 1977 protocols. Its core principles are four. Distinction requires that attacks be directed only at military objectives and never at civilians or civilian objects. Proportionality prohibits an attack expected to cause civilian harm excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated. Precaution requires that feasible steps be taken to verify targets and minimise harm. Military necessity permits only the force required to achieve a legitimate military aim. Specific rules follow from these, including prohibitions on attacking medical facilities, on starvation as a method of warfare, on perfidy such as feigning surrender, and on weapons that are indiscriminate or cause superfluous injury, which is the basis of the separate treaties banning chemical weapons, biological weapons, blinding lasers, landmines and cluster munitions.

The honest position is that enforcement is weak and not absent. States are obliged to prosecute grave breaches themselves and to search for suspects regardless of nationality, a principle of universal jurisdiction that a number of countries have used in national courts. International tribunals were created for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and convicted senior figures; the International Criminal Court, operating since 2002, prosecutes war crimes where national courts will not, though its jurisdiction depends on state consent or a Security Council referral and its record has been uneven. The International Committee of the Red Cross has a mandate under the conventions themselves to visit prisoners and the wounded, and its method is deliberately confidential, reporting privately to the detaining power rather than publicly, on the calculation that access is worth more than condemnation. That choice is criticised regularly and has been defended on the grounds that the alternative is exclusion.

Modern conflict tests the definitions. The conventions assume identifiable parties, a distinction between combatant and civilian, and territory that is occupied or not, and asymmetric warfare against non-state groups embedded in civilian populations fits none of that cleanly; the argument after 2001 over whether certain detainees were prisoners of war, criminals or a third category with no protections was a direct consequence, and the position that a gap exists was rejected by the United States Supreme Court in 2006, which held that Common Article 3 applied. Drone strikes raise questions about where a battlefield is, cyber operations about whether an attack has occurred, and autonomous weapons about whether a machine can apply the judgement that proportionality requires. The framework's defenders point out that it has been revised repeatedly and that its principles are general enough to extend, and its critics point out that revision requires state agreement that is increasingly hard to obtain. What is not disputed is that the alternative to imperfect rules is no rules, which is the condition Dunant found at Solferino.

Four treaties agreed in 1949, ratified by every state, protect wounded soldiers on land and at sea, prisoners of war and civilians in enemy hands, with Common Article 3 applying a humane minimum to civil wars and conflicts with armed groups. A parallel set of principles governs how attacks may be conducted, requiring distinction between military and civilian targets, proportionality, precaution and necessity. Enforcement rests on national prosecutions, international tribunals and the confidential access of the Red Cross, and modern asymmetric and remote warfare strains the definitions.