ATHA Thematic Brief IHL and Civil Society Organizations.pdf

Public International Law concerns the relationships between independent, sovereign states. It also regulates the functioning of international organizations and how they relate to each other, to states and to individuals. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL) are the main specialized legal frameworks that pertain directly to humanitarian actors and their activities.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) - also called the laws of war - regulates the conduct of hostilities, restricting the means and methods of warfare available to parties to the conflict, and laying out protections afforded to civilians and those no longer taking part in hostilities. 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, 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 complex questions and debates in regards to the status of non-state actors under international humanitarian law.

International Human Rights Law (IHRL) refers to the body of international law designed to promote and protect human rights at the international, regional and domestic levels. IHRL is closely related to, but distinct from IHL: the substantive norms they contain are often similar or related, but they are regulated by legally distinct frameworks and usually operate in different contexts and regulate different relationships. Generally, human rights are understood to regulate the relationship between states and individuals in the context of ordinary life, while humanitarian law regulates the actions of a belligerent state within the context of an armed conflict - but there are discussions on a convergence and evolution of the relationship between these frameworks.

Instead of focusing upon ‘classic’ state actors, the ATHA Thematic Brief on International Law 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.