Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict: Problems of Applicability

The Four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and their two additional Protocols of 1977 are treaties aiming to protect victims in time of armed conflict. To ensure they should benefit these victims, the drafters defined simple conditions of application resting on facts, and they provided for an automatic application of these treaties rather than letting their application depend on the free interpretation of the parties to an armed conflict. The level of protection provided depends on whether it is a conflict of an internal, high-intensity internal or international nature A certain margin of interpretation will subsist for the determination of an internal conflict because of the difficulties of fixing exact criteria. As the outbreak of a conflict normally takes place in a very sensitive political context, States may be inclined to deny the existence of situations leading to the applicability of these treaties and as a consequence not apply them as such. Although States may pragmatically respect and apply the content of these treaties in part or in whole, the origin of many of these violations can be found in this denial of applicability. As there is no supranational jurisdiction, respect for these fundamental rules protecting the human being must be implemented through a stronger sense of responsibility on the part of the international community.