In this interview, conducted after their visit to Hiroshima, President Peter Maurer and President Tadateru Konoe reflect on the human cost of nuclear weapons and present the perspective of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement on the Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Oslo, Nayarit, Mexico and Vienna, and the challenges ahead for nuclear disarmament.

This paper focuses on the “continuous combat function” concept and proposes to extend its application. First, the article will demonstrate that the continuous combat function concept should be extended to certain members of organized armed groups in cases where those groups do not belong to any of the parties to an international armed conflict and whose actions do not reach the level of intensity required for a separate non-international armed conflict (NIAC) to exist. Secondly, the paper will look at the extension of this concept in order to determine individual membership in State armed forces in the context of a NIAC, while arguing that the notion of “armed forces” should be interpreted differently depending of the nature of the conflict, be it international or non-international.

Since the adoption of the first United Nations Security Council (UNSC) counterterrorism resolution after the 9/11 attacks, the UNSC has increasingly required the domestic criminalization of “terrorism” acts and ancillary activities. Without the inclusion of an explicit international humanitarian law (IHL) or humanitarian exception, the UNSC has – so far – failed to harmonize the counterterrorism legal framework with IHL, leaving it up to States to define the interaction between the two. In their national legislation and courts, States’ interpretations have varied but counterterrorism legislations have been used to adjudicate conducts in armed conflicts, regardless of their legality under IHL. As the domestication of UNSC offences is ongoing, good practices are highlighted in this paper and recommendations are offered to ensure the development of international customary law in accordance with IHL.

Analyses of the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence often focus on the principles’ meanings and/or the challenges of applying them in practice. This article, by contrast, steps back to address foundational but somewhat neglected questions about whether these principles can accurately be designated “the” humanitarian principles; about how they came to govern the whole humanitarian sector; about their legal character and normative content; and, more fundamentally, about whether the principles can even have objective character and content. It begins by defining “humanitarian principles” and determining whether and on what basis certain principles constitute “the” humanitarian principles. The article then traces the history of how the principles came to govern the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and diffused from there to non-governmental organizations and the United Nations system. It then analyzes the principles’ legal character and normative content for each of the above-mentioned categories of actor plus States, demonstrating that the principles do not – and, legally, cannot – have fixed legal character and normative content. While humanitarian actors share common understandings of the principles, legally the character and content of each principle flows from its source for the actor in question.

Con profunda tristeza, el CICR se enteró del fallecimiento, el 5 de noviembre de 1991, a la edad de 80 años, del profesor Stanislaw E. Nahlik.

Los miembros del Comité Internacional y muchos de sus colaboradores que lo conocían bien deploran la desaparición de un gran humanista de nuestro tiempo, que dedicó su vida a la defensa y a la promoción del derecho.

Nacido el 8 de mayo de 1911 en Lvov (Polonia), Stanislaw Nahlik hizo sus estudios en la Universidad Johann-Casimir de Lvov, donde obtuvo, en 1933, licenciaturas en Derecho y en Ciencias Políticas. En 1936, entró en el servicio diplomático de la República de Polonia y sucesivamente, trabajó en el Consulado General de Polonia en Londres y, de 1939 a 1946, en la Embajada de Polonia en Berna.

The growth of access to the internet, wide availability of smart phones and increased public access to remote sensing data from hundreds of satellite systems have spurred a revolution in tracking the linkages between armed conflict and environmental damage. Over the last decade, a growing community of open-source investigative experts, environmentalists, academics and civil society groups have applied these methods to document war crimes, human rights violations and environmental degradation. These developments have created new opportunities for building accountability and transparency. The wealth of data on conflict-linked environmental damage has already been successfully leveraged to address acute and long-term environmental health risks and inform humanitarian response and post-conflict environmental assessments in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. There are, however, larger questions on how to best make use of these data streams and information layers, and how to navigate the opportunities and limitations of these developments. This article will outline the new developments in this field and provide recommendations to ensure that data is used responsibly and effectively to strengthen accountability for environmental damages as a result of armed conflict.

Since its launch in 2021, the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations (the Charter) has been signed by hundreds of humanitarian actors across the world, including local and national organizations, United Nations agencies, National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and large international NGOs. The Charter's development grew out of a sector-wide recognition that humanitarians have a role to play in addressing the crises of climate change and environmental degradation, and that fulfilling this role would entail changing how they work. Two years into its existence, the Charter has helped build momentum towards this change and has provided a useful measurement tool for how much remains to be done.

This paper traces the origins, inspiration and process of the Charter from the perspective of the present authors, who co-led the Charter's development. The article highlights some of the challenges that we faced and how these were addressed. In taking stock of progress towards the Charter's goals, the article flags areas where further effort is needed to adequately strengthen the humanitarian response to the climate and environmental crises.

Despite widespread State acceptance of the international law governing military use of force across the spectrum of operations, the humanitarian reality in today's armed conflicts and other situations of violence worldwide is troubling. The structure and incentives of armed forces dictate the need to more systematically integrate that law into operational practice. However, treaty and customary international law is not easily translated into coherent operational guidance and rules of engagement (RoE), a problem that is exacerbated by differences of language and perspective between the armed forces and neutral humanitarian actors with a stake in the law's implementation. The author examines the operative language of RoE with a view to facilitating the work of accurately integrating relevant law of armed conflict and human rights law norms. The analysis highlights three crucial debates surrounding the use of military force and their practical consequences for operations: the dividing line between the conduct of hostilities and law enforcement frameworks, the definition of membership in an organized armed group for the purpose of lethal targeting, and the debate surrounding civilian direct participation in hostilities and the consequent loss of protection against direct attack.

Following the events of 11 September 2001, measures aimed at countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) were intensified by States. Many countries around the world adopted strict anti-money laundering and CFT regulations for the transfer of funds globally. This process increased the costs of complying with regulatory requirements and imposed high penalties on banks for non-compliance. As a result, preventive measures – often known as “de-risking” – were taken up by banks, including terminating the accounts of clients perceived as “high-risk” for money laundering or terrorist financing, and delaying transfers. These measures, however, have had negative consequences, reducing financial access for local civil society organizations in conflict-affected contexts that are deemed high-risk for terrorist activities. Drawing on five years of research to understand the impact of de-risking on conflict-affected contexts from a local perspective, this paper reflects on the local political economy of CFT, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. It explores two key areas of inquiry. The first of these is the politics of interpretation – how counterterrorism as a discourse and a set of practices, of which CFT is one, gets interpreted by local authorities and banks, and subsequently gets reinterpreted to the population. This also has implications for which local actors are better positioned to access funds than others, and why. The second area of inquiry is the politics of vulnerability – how the local political economy impact of CFT can increase the social and economic vulnerabilities of some groups more than others. This paper demonstrates that under the guise of “counterterrorism”, local authorities in conflict-affected contexts have used CFT to restrict the non-profit and philanthropic space and are using banking regulations to shape that space in ways that are bound to have negative medium- and long-term implications for it.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) first called for the abolishment of nuclear weapons in September 1945.1 The call came in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where ICRC delegates had witnessed the catastrophic effects of nuclear weapons while working alongside the Japanese Red Cross to care for tens of thousands of wounded and dying civilians. The experience had a profound impact on the ICRC and on the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement) as a whole. During the following decades, the Movement continued to regularly call for the “absolute prohibition” of nuclear weapons2 – one of the most abhorrent and inhumane types of weapon ever created. To date, the ICRC and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have made a significant contribution towards nuclear disarmament by influencing debates, state policy and practice, and international law on nuclear weapons.

Among the increasingly frequent acts of non-compliance with, and grievous violations of, international humanitarian law around the world, especially in non-international armed conflicts, attacks on objects and persons enjoying special protection, and their abuse, as well as the misuse of the distinctive emblems of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, come as no surprise. Although a repressive approach to the problem – through the prosecution and punishment of perpetrators – cannot completely prevent such occurrences, an effective and appropriate judicial stigmatisation can significantly contribute to making them as rare as possible. In this regard, the court proceedings held before the War Crimes Chamber in Belgrade and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in connection with the events in and around the Vukovar Hospital and Ovčara farm have provided an appropriate judicial response. This is notwithstanding the fact that, at least for now, not all perpetrators have been prosecuted for their acts (or failure to act) at the time of the commission of these grave crimes.

As a social and political psychologist, I have been doing research on issues of collective behaviour and collective identities for over fifteen years. One of my three lines of research focuses on conflict at the intergroup level, and specifically on the factors that allow individuals to behave in a violent manner or in violation of certain norms, such as international humanitarian law (IHL). My work has to do, among other things, with strategies of “moral disengagement”; in other words, all the psychological justifications that we give ourselves for our behaviour, particularly when it comes to immoral, unlawful and violent behaviour.