Peter Maurer served as President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from 2012 to 2022. During his time as President, Maurer prioritized strengthening humanitarian diplomacy, engaging States and other actors for the respect of international humanitarian law, and improving the humanitarian response through innovation and new partnerships. Meanwhile, he oversaw an historic budget increase and organizational expansion. Prior to his role at the ICRC, Mr Maurer served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Switzerland and headed the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs. Earlier, Mr Maurer held various positions representing Switzerland at the United Nations (UN) in New York, including Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the UN, Chairman of the UN's Fifth Committee, and member of the UN Peacebuilding Commission. Mr Maurer had first joined the Swiss diplomatic service in 1987, through which he held various positions in Bern, Pretoria and New York. Maurer was born in Thun, Switzerland in 1956. He studied history and international law in Bern, where he also earned a doctorate.

Theodor Meron has been a Judge and, between March 2012 and January 2019, was the President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (the Mechanism). He was also a Judge of the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda from November 2011 until the closure of those tribunals. He served a total of four terms as President of the ICTY and three terms as President of the Mechanism. A leading scholar of international humanitarian law, human rights and international criminal law, Judge Meron is the author of thirteen books on international law and chivalry in Shakespeare and more than 100 articles, including some of the books and articles that helped build the legal foundations for the international criminal tribunals. His most recent book is Standing up for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2021).

He is a member of the Institute of International Law and of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous awards, honours and medals, such as the Hudson Medal (American Society of International Law) and the Haskins Prize (American Council of Learned Societies). He is also an Officer of the French Legion of Honour, Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit, Officer of the Order of Merit of Poland and Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (United Kingdom). A past honorary President of the American Society of International Law and past Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law and Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he is Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus at NYU Law School and, since 2014, a Visiting Professor of Law at Oxford University. He is a Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, an Academic Associate of the Bonavero Human Rights Institute and an Honorary Fellow at Trinity College.

Emily Crawford is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Law School, where she teaches and researches in international law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law. She has published widely in the field of international humanitarian law, including three monographs (The Treatment of Combatants and Insurgents under the Law of Armed Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2010), Identifying the Enemy: Civilian Participation in Hostilities (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Non-Binding Norms in International Humanitarian Law (Oxford University Press, 2021)), and a textbook (International Humanitarian Law (with Alison Pert, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2020)). She is an associate of the Sydney Centre for International Law, and a co-editor of the Journal of International Humanitarian Studies.

Dr Eirini Giorgou is a Legal Adviser in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Arms and Conduct of Hostilities Unit, where she works, among other issues, on explosive weapons in populated areas and on nuclear weapons. She has several years’ experience in multilateral disarmament and arms control diplomacy and negotiations outside the ICRC. She is a licensed lawyer and holds a PhD in international law from the University of Geneva.

This essay explores how the drafters of international humanitarian law (IHL) incorporated the past into their work between 1860 and 2020, and how they approached time, memory and history as indicators for this view of the past. Its sources consist of the complete series of general conventional and customary IHL instruments as well as the leading commentaries on them. For the IHL view of time, the impact of legal principles on the perception of time is scrutinized. Balancing nonretroactivity against customary international law and the humanity principle broadens the temporal scope towards the past, while balancing legal forgetting against imprescriptibility and State succession broadens it towards the future. For the IHL view of memory, dead persons and cultural heritage are seen as crucial vectors. Attention to the fate of the dead has been a constant hallmark of IHL, while care for cultural heritage has an even longer pedigree. For the IHL view of history, the essay highlights that the International Committee of the Red Cross has consistently advocated State duties to the war dead and has organized an archival infrastructure to satisfy the need – later converted into a right – of families and society to search for the historical truth about them.

Furthermore, the responses of IHL drafters to five major historical challenges are examined. First, while in the realm of war crimes impunity prevailed for most of history, after World War II a system of war crimes trials was mounted, culminating in the International Criminal Court. Second, soul-searching about the atrocities of World War II, including the Holocaust, helped create Geneva Convention IV of 1949, which protects civilians in wartime. Third, the human rights idea was not fully embraced by IHL treaty drafters until 1968. Fourth, the IHL approach to civil wars was slow and incomplete, but its appearance in 1949 and coming of age in 1977 were breakthroughs nevertheless. Fifth, colonial conflicts were not recognized as international wars in 1949, when this could have had considerable impact, but only in 1977, when decolonization was largely over. In all cases, the responses to these historical challenges came after long delays. Clearly, the IHL view of the past has to be assessed on a transgenerational scale.

Over the last few decades, an extraordinary amount has changed in our understanding of the history of international humanitarian law (IHL). This article addresses the latest findings in this new historiography, placing contemporary IHL issues in a broader historical context and sharing the author's own experiences as a researcher exploring the discipline's practice from a historical perspective. Ultimately, he makes a passionate case for history – by showing why this discipline has a lot to offer for practitioners of international law.

In an effort towards better explaining the authority of international humanitarian law (IHL) on the African continent, the Regional Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Pretoria recently examined the relationship between African traditional customs and modern-day principles of IHL. Evidence of a clear correlation would illustrate a respect for the law of war on the African continent. The outcome of the research conducted by the ICRC was the creation of the “Tool on African Traditions and the Preservation of Humanity during War”, which illustrates eleven African traditions and the related principles of contemporary IHL. The Tool is a living project, which will continue to be updated, and which is presented in various formats that can be used for both pedagogical and operational outreach.

Little is known about how international humanitarian law has developed around the world, other than in Europe and the USA. However, it is a topic worth researching, as it may reveal new connections, causalities and the previously unknown origins of legal institutions. Mexico is a good example of how the rules of war developed differently in different countries, since – as early as 1871 – it incorporated the law of war in its domestic criminal law. This article will explore how the idea of criminalizing violations of the laws of war flourished in nineteenth-century Mexico. A combination of factors including foreign interventions, civil wars, the liberal convictions of the drafters of the Mexican Criminal Code and their will to achieve the rank of “civilized nations” led to the creation of the crime “violations of the duties of humanity”. This development was a milestone in the history of pursuing individual criminal responsibility for violations of the laws of war and, therefore, is a missing piece in its history.

In 1899, the delegates at the first Hague Peace Conference outlawed the use of expanding bullets in warfare. Also known as “dum-dum” bullets, their prohibition was largely the product of a media spectacle that evolved around their use in British colonial warfare, a spectacle that focused particularly on the ghastly nature of the wounds these bullets inflicted. This article revisits the “dum-dum” controversy of the 1890s as it played out in the Anglo-European public sphere. It argues, firstly, that there was nothing all that innovative about employing the principle of expansion in rifle ammunition. Secondly, it shows that controversies around bullets and their wounds had existed since the invention of industrially produced military rifles – and soft-lead ammunition – in the 1850s. In 1868, the St Petersburg Declaration outlawed the use of exploding projectiles for many of the same reasons for which expanding ammunition would also be banned in 1899. The article also shows that many of the ideas mobilized in the early 1890s to promote a new range of cordite-powered full-metal-jacket bullets because of the supposedly “clean” and “humanitarian” wounds that they inflicted offer an important context in which to read and explain the prohibition of “man-slaying” expanding ammunition. Above all, the article highlights how powerful racist thinking and imperial imperatives were to the framers of the laws of war at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Martens Clause owes its name to the diplomat and jurist Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens, a representative of the Russian Empire at the First Hague Conference in 1899. Drafted and proposed by Martens during the negotiations, yet as a spontaneous compromise, the Clause has been included in the preamble of the Hague Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land and is still considered an important principle of international humanitarian law today. This article traces the biography and academic path of F. F. Martens and explores the enduring significance of the Martens Clause.

This article explores the interface between religion and international humanitarian law (IHL), and the degree to which they might complement and reinforce each other. It examines some of the challenges inherent in regulating armed conflict and the understandable limitations of IHL in this respect, and argues that re-engagement with IHL's religious roots can help to alleviate them. Engagement with religious circles mobilizes the vast resources of religions to increase knowledge of IHL and corresponding religious norms, thereby enhancing their legitimacy across religious and cultural divides. This is most effective when comparative study of IHL and religious teachings stimulates mutual learning and debate, in which both correspondences and differences are embraced. In the absence of a strong legal enforcement regime, religions can reinforce military ethics by tapping deeply into the identities, motivations and moral values of many belligerents, and possess powerful means to socialize the rules of war and improve voluntary compliance. Introspective religious practices encourage the moral self-reflection that is most effective at internalizing norms in this respect, as well as providing belligerents with the spiritual and psychological support needed to bolster their resilience and enable them to perform with precision and restraint.

What does Hinduism have to say about the rules of armed conflict? How might Hinduism enrich the modern global discourse on international humanitarian law (IHL)? What convergences might be found, and what areas of divergence? This paper examines and contextualizes the rules of armed conflict advocated in classical Hindu texts, especially in the epic Mahābhārata, where important norms of Hinduism are established. It also examines the other major epic, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Dharmaśāstras (Law Codes), as well as the Arthaśāstra, which takes an alternative (realpolitik) approach. This paper focuses on conduct during armed conflict (jus in bello), now synonymous for many with IHL, rather than considerations leading up to war (jus ad bellum). The paper seeks to illuminate both convergences and divergences with IHL and highlight particular Hindu approaches on the righteous (dharmic) application of violence. Like IHL, classical Hinduism values (1) proportionality of force during armed engagement; (2) the minimization of human suffering during combat; (3) care for survivors of war; (4) immunity towards non-combatants, especially civilians; and (5) balancing military necessity with humanity. With respect to divergences, classical Hinduism extols non-violence in ways that critique even the warrior's duty to engage in righteous war (dharma yuddha). In contrast to IHL, the Hindu epics have some different limitations; for instance, they limit the right to combat to a particular caste, the kṣatriyas, though this concept could be modernized to mean uniformed personnel of the State. The epics also disavow certain practices that are legal under IHL, such as ambushes and surprise attacks against legitimate targets. The Hindu proportionality provision goes beyond IHL by prescribing that only warriors of the same type should fight. With its many deeply ethical considerations, Hinduism enriches modern IHL through its heightened emphasis on fair and humane conduct in battle and its call towards compassion on behalf of both combatants and non-combatants.

This article takes a critical look at the development of international humanitarian law (IHL), from its early codification in the Hague and Geneva Conventions to the present day. It examines why and how IHL develops – through treaty, custom, interpretation and soft-law instruments, as well as the influence of jurisprudence and other branches of law. In doing so, it highlights some of the distinctive elements of IHL that set it apart from other bodies of law and explains how these elements influence IHL development. Turning to the present, it addresses some of the key arguments commonly heard against attempting any further development of IHL, by answering the following three key questions: Does IHL need to develop further? If so, how can this be achieved? And what are the prospects for such development in the near future? In answering these questions, the article argues that IHL will continue to develop in many ways, and that while the current environment does not appear propitious for new legally binding norms of IHL, they continue to be both necessary and possible.

Both in its advisory and contentious jurisdiction, the International Court of Justice has made considerable contributions to the evolution and interpretation of international humanitarian law (IHL). The judgments and advisory opinions of the Court in various cases have also developed the regulation of armed conflicts by showing the interplay of other bodies of international law and have shaped the development of non-binding IHL norms. The purpose of this short article is to consider the role of the International Court of Justice in the development of IHL.

This article examines the authority of the 2005 International Committee of the Red Cross Study on Customary international humanitarian law within the international legal system by collecting and analysing citations to the Study in documents containing expressions of State positions, in the judgments of international and domestic courts and tribunals and in the outputs of other influential actors. Our analysis establishes that the Study is increasingly seen as a highly authoritative instrument, such that a particular proposition will be found to reflect customary international law simply on the basis that the Study says so. We argue that the Study's authority will likely only increase over time.

Legal commentaries are a type of secondary source that provides clarity about the meaning of treaty provisions so they can be appropriately interpreted and applied by practitioners. Since 1870, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has produced such commentaries on each successive international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty or update to an existing treaty. Over time, who drafts these commentaries and the methodology behind them has evolved, from early commentaries written by a single jurist who had participated in the drafting of the treaty to multi-authored works based on extensive research and the methodology found in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The ICRC Commentaries have always been geared towards those tasked with applying IHL, but this audience has expanded over time, giving them a more global reach, and their reception has evolved accordingly. The most recent iteration of the ICRC Commentaries on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols is currently being produced, with some changes in methodology to guarantee that they remain a practical tool for the interpretation and application of those instruments.

This article sheds light on the legal instruments and policies adopted by the Organization of African Unity/African Union (AU) in relation to international humanitarian law. It also offers analysis on the role of the AU institutions that provide humanitarian and disaster relief. The article highlights the importance of the institutions established to improve the capacity of regional and national institutions for humanitarian prevention and response. It reflects on the reasons why the AU focuses on early warning systems to address the root causes of conflicts and humanitarian disasters, rather than only adopting reactive policies after the fact, in order to save lives and prevent human suffering.

This contribution reflects on the development of informal expert manuals in the field of the laws of armed conflict. These manuals are presented as restating existing customary law, perhaps adding a few elements de lege ferenda but not having a straightforward normative intent. The authors of expert manuals state them to be non-binding, and their drafting takes place mostly in self-appointed groups. Although a normative intent may be absent when drafting such informal expert manuals, such rules may obtain normative effect nevertheless. While States are mostly absent in these processes, they seem to have a specific interest in the development of these manuals.

This article analyzes the contribution of the Guidelines for the Implementation of the 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (the Guidelines) to better protection of cultural property in peacetime and in times of armed conflict. The first part of the article introduces the Guidelines within the context of the implementation of the 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1999 Second Protocol) and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and provides examples of UNESCO's other standard-setting instruments such as the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural or Natural Heritage, the 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, as well as bodies providing for guidelines for these instruments. The second part underscores the most important advances of the Guidelines in the implementation of the 1999 Second Protocol. The third part focuses on the contribution of the Guidelines as subsequent practice in the application of the 1999 Second Protocol establishing the agreement of the parties regarding its interpretation in the framework of Article 31(3)(b) of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Finally, the fourth part concludes by highlighting the main advantages of the Guidelines in providing better protection for cultural property.