I would like to make one brief point before we go on to our speakers. Having done a good deal of talking on university campuses about the laws of war during the last three years, I have been very much struck by the amount of cynicism, disillusionment, and rejection of the idea of having laws of war at all. When I have endeavored to make a case for them, many students and faculty members have reproached me with me notion that there is something fundamentally inconsistent between the idea of law and the idea of war.

It is apparent that the laws of war (by which I mean both the law protecting prisoners, sick and wounded, and civilians under the control of a belligerent on the one hand, and the law governing the conduct of hostilities on the other) are in large part old and in considerable part obsolete. The. Geneva Conventions of 1949, the most recent major international instruments in diis field, cover the protection of prisoners of war, the sick and wounded, and civilians in occupied territory. But they reflect the experience of World War II, and their applicability to more recent types of warfare is not always easy. Civil wars, mixed civil and international conflicts, and guerrilla warfare in general all raise problems under those conventions. Moreover, all too often nations refuse to apply the conventions in situations where they clearly should be applied. Attempts to justify such refusals are often based on differences between the conflicts presently encountered and those for which the conventions were supposedly adopted. Other aspects of the laws of war, except for the use of poison gas and bacteriological weapons (which were the subjects of the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol), and the protection of cultural property (the subject of a 1954 Convention), have been left untouched since the Hague Conventions of 1907. The expansion of military objectives and changes in weaponry and fire power have increased many fold the vulnerability of noncombatants. The law has not developed apace.

Modern mass media feed, or overfeed us with reports on the horrors of armed conflicts. Little is heard, however, about restraints observed in accordance with valid rules. Little is also heard about the efforts made in recent years to update the rules applicable in armed conflicts. Even international lawyers know much more about the proposals to update the law of the sea than about the draft rules worked out by the ICRC for international and noninternational armed conflicts. There is also ignorance about the conferences of government experts which have discussed the ICRC drafts in Geneva in 1971 and 1972 and the world conference proposed by the Swiss Government to convene early in 1974.

The two highly interesting and stimulating presentations we have just heard provide us with an excellent survey of a number of important aspects of the law of armed conflicts, both as it stands today and from the point of view of lex ferenda. As George Aldrich correctly predicted, although the program for this meeting promised “conflicting views,” there appears to be much common ground between him and Hans Blix, much more than in fact has been apparent of late between the U.S. and Swedish Governments on certain other (though related) matters.