ATHA Thematic Brief IHL and Civil Society Organizations.pdf

IHL is the field of public international law which regulates the conduct of hostilities, namely restricting the means and methods of warfare available to parties to the conflict, and laying out protections afforded civilians and those no longer taking part in hostilities (hors de combat).

State-centric in their development, the central tenets of IHL are found in the Hague Regulations of 1907, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the two Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1977. It is the right of sovereign states to decide which treaty-based international legal obligations they adopt regarding the legal regulation of the conduct of armed conflicts, however a number of legal provisions of IHL have attained the status of customary international law, and are thus binding on all parties to the conflict. This raises questions in regards to the status of non-state actors under international humanitarian law.

Instead of focusing upon ‘classic’ state actors, ATHA Thematic Brief on IHL and Civil Society Organizations presented on this page focuses on civil society, an often overlooked actor which has a role to play, not only in zones of armed conflict as such for their work on the ground, but also vis-à-vis the legal norms that are applicable in such an environment. As neither a state nor an intergovernmental organization, and as a significant portion of civil society, NGOs have a key role to play, both normatively speaking and as demonstrated by past experience.