War and what we make of the law
Preventing the catastrophic human cost of war is a central purpose of modern international law. Some norms, like those found in the UN Charter, set out to eliminate war altogether, requiring the peace...
18 Jul 202412min
Principles under pressure: have humanitarian principles stood the test of time?
Recent conflicts have brought to light the jarring personal dilemmas humanitarian workers confront and provoked legitimate questions about the validity of the principles of humanity, impartiality, neu...
11 Jul 202416min
Forced to report: mandatory reporting of sexual violence in armed conflict
Over the last decade, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement partners, as well as other humanitarian actors responding to sexual violence, have inc...
4 Jul 202419min
De-dehumanization: practicing humanity
There is today an idea of a single humanity, with each member equally valued, and a global legal framework exists to prevent needless human suffering, including in war. Dehumanization arises as the ne...
27 Jun 202418min
Trapped in conflict: urban sieges and encirclement
Based on the ICRC’s firsthand observations in and around cities in conflict across the globe, an evolved form of one of the oldest methods of warfare – siege and encirclement – remains a persistent fe...
20 Jun 202429min
Reinventing the wheel: 3 lessons the AWS debate can learn from existing arms control agreements
For more than a decade, states have met at the UN in Geneva to discuss the governance of autonomous weapon systems (AWS). One pandemic, several real-world cases of artificial intelligence (AI) being u...
13 Jun 202415min
Internment pursuant to GC4 during an IAC: practice from Norway
The Fourth Geneva Convention was the first humanitarian law convention dedicated to protections for civilians during armed conflict. Amongst its numerous protective rules, it also provides the main ru...
6 Jun 20249min
Civilian internment in international armed conflict: when does it begin?
The legal and practical issues related to the exceptional practice of internment of protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention are complex. One such question is when internment begins. The t...
23 Mai 202413min
