The Geneva Conventions at 75

Editor’s note: This piece was adapted from the Security Council Report’s August 2024 Monthly Forecast.

Aug. 12 marked the 75th anniversary of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which sit at the core of international humanitarian law (IHL). The four conventions and their additional protocols seek to limit the effects of armed conflict on civilians and those no longer engaging in hostilities. The International Committee of the Red Cross has described these treaties as “one of humanity’s most important accomplishments of the last century.” Switzerland is organizing an informal visit of United Nations Security Council members to Geneva later this month to take a closer look at the meaning and purpose of the conventions, which have been universally ratified.

In recent years, blatant disregard for IHL has been a feature of conflicts around the world, including several on the council’s agenda. Attacks on civilians and civilian objects have been widely reported in Gaza and Israel, Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine, among other cases, leading to enormous suffering and loss of life. For the Security Council, the anniversary offers a time for somber and sober reflection.

What Do the Geneva Conventions Say?

The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their additional protocols contain rules designed to protect civilians and those who can no longer engage in conflict, such as wounded and sick soldiers and prisoners of war. The Fourth Geneva Convention focuses specifically on civilians and includes detailed provisions on their treatment, status, and rights. Unsurprisingly, the Geneva Conventions are referred to in contemporary discussions on the protection of civilians in conflict zones such as Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

All four conventions contain an identical Article 3, which applies to non-international armed conflicts. Among other things, it prohibits acts with respect to persons taking no active part in hostilities. These violations include the following:

• Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture.
• Taking of hostages.
• Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.
• The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees widely recognized as indispensable.

The Fourth Geneva Convention also sets out rules relating to accountability for grave breaches. Under Article 146, for example, the parties undertake to enact legislation that provides for penal sanctions for persons who commit grave breaches.

The Growing Harm to Civilians in Armed Conflict

A recent policy brief by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reviewing the Security Council’s consideration of its protection of civilians agenda during the years 2019-2023 affirmed that the council has played a key normative role in promoting some of the principles that underpin IHL. The brief describes ways in which the council has pronounced itself on the obligations of conflict parties, including with respect to the conduct of hostilities and the protections accorded to specific people and objects in conflict. The brief explains, for example, that the council, through Resolution 2475 and Resolution 2474, “incorporated the protection needs of persons with disabilities, as well as missing persons and their next of kin.” The brief also notes that the council has consistently integrated protection language into country-specific resolutions, including in the mandates of peace operations, most of which are called upon “to investigate, monitor, analyze and report on IHL and IHRL [international human rights law] violations and abuses.” It adds that the most common protection of civilians-related listing criteria for Security Council-authorized sanctions “relate to violations of IHL and IHRL abuses.”

The council’s pronouncements notwithstanding, OCHA also offers a grim assessment of the status of the protection of civilians in armed conflict, finding that “the existing gap between the growing normative framework and the realities experienced by civilians in conflict-affected contexts across the world has remained, if not widened, in the past five years.”

The UN secretary-general’s May 2024 report on the protection of civilians in 2023 similarly observes that in many conflicts—including issues on the council’s agenda such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Syria, and Ukraine—“compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law is often lacking … and the demands of the Council’s protection of civilians resolutions of the past 25 years have gone largely unheeded.” In 2023, “hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed or suffered appalling injuries as victims of deliberate or indiscriminate attacks, as well as purportedly lawful attacks under international humanitarian law.” That year, the UN recorded more than 33,443 civilian deaths in armed conflict, representing a 72 percent increase from 2022.

Not all civilian deaths in conflict can be attributed to violations of international law. But the widespread failure to adhere to the laws and norms of war are contributing to this high civilian death toll.

Challenges in the Security Council

Why do Security Council resolutions on protection matters, including in relation to IHL, go unheeded? In some cases, council members, both permanent and elected, are directly involved or have strategic interests in conflicts under discussion. This has hampered the council’s leverage in resolving wars and in mitigating harm done to civilians by IHL violations. Notable examples of this include conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Syria.

Long-standing concerns that some members express about interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and a willingness to defer to regional actors even when they are slow to act, can also limit the council’s engagement. Take, for example, the civil war in Tigray, Ethiopia: From 2020 to 2022, some members (namely, the African members on the council during this period, China, and Russia) preferred to have the council take a back seat to regional actors, limiting its scope of action while the fighting raged on, despite reports of extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual violence, and the obstruction of humanitarian access.

Further, the war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas have focused international attention on how great power interests can hamper the council’s work. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the council has by and large been a bystander, amid reports of attacks on civilian infrastructure, the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, summary executions, torture, and sexual violence. The Security Council has adopted only one resolution on Ukraine since the start of the war, a “Uniting for Peace” resolution, which referred the issue to the General Assembly for an emergency special session (ESS) in response to gridlock among council members. (As this is considered a procedural matter, the resolution was not subject to the veto, which is why Russia was unable to block it.) Although the General Assembly has adopted seven resolutions in the Ukraine ESS since February 2022, its resolutions lack the political and legal standing of Security Council resolutions and cannot, for example, impose binding obligations on member states under the UN Charter.

A divided council has also failed to protect civilians and uphold IHL in Gaza during the current war that began with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel. The council’s response to the conflict in Gaza has featured contentious and prolonged negotiations, with multiple failed adoptions. The United States, which has provided Israel with political and military backing throughout the war, has severely constrained the council’s ability to respond to the crisis, including by vetoing three draft resolutions on the conflict. China and Russia, in turn, have also vetoed two U.S.-proposed draft resolutions on the war. The four resolutions that have been adopted on the crisis—resolutions 2712, 2720, 2728, and 2735—have largely gone unimplemented. The Gaza conflict featured violations of IHL and IHRL, and war crimes have been committed by the parties, according to a May 27 report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, covering the period Oct. 7 through Dec. 31, 2023.   

The council is also losing support for some of its robust tools—including peacekeeping and sanctions—which have historically been used to protect civilians and promote accountability. In part, the waning support for these tools reflects the growing perception that the council is failing to promote peace and security. The value of UN peacekeeping, once an area of broad agreement among council members, is increasingly being called into question. Tasking the African Union or multinational actors, such as the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti, with helping to bring stability to war-torn countries is the most widely considered alternative at present, as reflected in A New Agenda for Peace, the secretary-general’s July 2023 policy brief. Similarly, some council members—especially China and Russia—have frequently expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of UN sanctions regimes and, in certain cases, argue that they harm the ability of target countries to serve their populations. In this regard, in a July 2024 council meeting, China asserted that the “implementation of sanctions often leads to negative impacts on the affected countries, the humanitarian situations, people’s livelihoods and normal economic and trade activities”

Geopolitical interests also shape members’ calculations with respect to the council’s robust tools. For example, the Mali sanctions regime, which included violations of IHRL or IHL among its listing criteria, fell victim to a Russian veto in July 2023. In June 2023, Mali withdrew its consent for the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali—a large peacekeeping operation with a robust protection mandate—which has since been shuttered. The P3 (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and their allies have criticized the involvement of the Wagner Group—a Russian security company now renamed the Africa Corps—in Mali, a former French colony that until 2022 hosted French military forces.

Tension in the Security Council around legal accountability measures is not new but has sharpened, as demonstrated by its approach to the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Three of the five permanent Security Council members (China, Russia, and the United States) are not state parties to the ICC. While the council referred two cases to the ICC—Sudan (Darfur) in 2005 and Libya in 2011—such a referral is highly unlikely today, given the antagonism toward the court from some key council members. Russia, which has regularly criticized the ICC, has amplified its opposition since the court’s March 17, 2023, announcement that it had issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for allegedly committing the war crimes of unlawful deportation and unlawful transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia. For example, in the semiannual briefing from the ICC prosecutor on the court’s work in Darfur in January, Russia said that “for some 20 years, the ICC has been engaged in sabotaging the mandates of the security council, shifting the blame to national authorities, the complex security situation or a lack of resources.”

The United States, meanwhile, has continued its steady supply of weapons to Israel, notwithstanding the fact that in May, ICC Prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad Khan announced that he was filing applications for arrest warrants before the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes. Moreover, the U.S. government has hosted both Netanyahu and Gallant since the applications were filed. (It should be noted that Khan is also seeking an arrest warrant for the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, for allegedly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, and had also done the same for the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, and the commander in chief of the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s military wing], Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, both of whom have since been killed.)

Silver Linings?

The 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions invites reflection on how the norms and values they embody can be implemented in today’s difficult environment. One heartening sign is that, notwithstanding the divisions in the Security Council, several members have continued to assert the importance of IHL and call out violations, including in statements on issues such as Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine. This is also evident in the language of resolutions penned by elected members on Gaza, including Resolution 2728, which was drafted by the 10 elected members of the council and demanded an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire, as well as the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.

The council’s tools—including those that promote prevention, protect civilians, and enhance accountability—need to be reinvigorated. In this regard, it is worth revisiting how to strengthen UN peace operations, especially in light of the increasingly complex environments in which they operate and the withdrawals of host country consent that led to the closures of peace operations in Mali and Sudan. In addition, the recent resurrection of the Informal Working Group of the Security Council on General UN Sanctions Issues—which previously operated from 2000 to 2006 and was established “on a temporary basis … to develop general recommendations on how to improve the effectiveness of United Nations sanctions”—is a positive sign. It could provide a useful mechanism for building trust and understanding around the use of UN sanctions.

In September, member states are expected to adopt the Pact for the Future, laying out their vision for the future of multilateralism. Since it is a consensus document, the end product will likely not be bold or innovative. However, it could allow members to reaffirm the importance of international humanitarian and human rights law, and offer ideas for how to mitigate the barbarous effects of war on civilians.

As the world marks the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, much work needs to be done. While IHL provides a road map that can help protect the most vulnerable in war, its application has been lacking in far too many cases. More consistent adherence to IHL would save lives and serve to mitigate the effects of armed conflict.