Untitled - the ultimate blog

The Geneva conventions at 60
Unleashing the laws of war
Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The chasm is still too wide between noble Swiss ideas and the hard reality of locations where
war is hell
AP
Bosnia, where treaties didn’t help
WALK the calm, well-heeled streets of Geneva and there seems little to connect this metropolis in neutral
Switzerland with the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda and the rape camps of Bosnia in the 1990s, or the
appalling violence lately inflicted on civilians caught up in fighting in Darfur, Chad or eastern Congo. Yet
decisions taken in Geneva do have an effect, both legal and humanitarian, on people in benighted places—
and the world would be much happier if the effect was far greater.
The city is the UN’s humanitarian hub, headquarters to both its refugee and human-rights agencies. More
memorably, though, it lends its name to a clutch of conventions, adopted six decades ago this month,
initially with the horrors of two world wars in mind. Those agreements still form a bedrock for the laws of
war and the protection of non-combatants.
Yet in a year that has already seen bitter fighting in Gaza and Sri Lanka, and a still mounting civilian toll in
an eight-year-old battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, some inevitably question whether the Geneva
conventions and their later protocols are really suited to today’s conflicts. The number of wars between
states, where regular, uniformed armies square off against each other, has fallen sharply. This century it
has mostly been conflicts within countries that have claimed headlines, with insurgents and rebels,
sometimes with foreign backing, battling each other as well as their own government.
Do the old rules really apply in such conflicts? And if they still do, how can they be enforced more
effectively, since all the evidence suggests they are not only not honoured but dishonoured in the breach?
Can they be stretched to cover new threats, such as international terrorism and piracy?
To the chagrin of those who would banish war itself, neither the four Geneva conventions of 1949—
covering the treatment of the wounded on land and at sea, of prisoners-of-war and of civilians caught up
in conflict—nor the couple of extra protocols added in 1977, spelling out in more detail the protection
afforded to civilians, seek to outlaw conflict (see table below). Nor do they presume (although they do
more for the innocent than the earlier Hague conventions, which concentrated chiefly on outlawing some
weapons of warfare) that civilians in a war zone always can be or even should be spared.
-84-