ICRC Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog

Several years after the Islamic State group lost its last territory in March 2019, tens of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, and third-country nationals from around 60 countries – including many children – remained in camps and prisons in north-east Syria and Iraq. In early 2026, almost 6,000 detainees were transferred to Iraq, among them children who were caught up in a war they did not choose. Repatriation remains the best way forward for most of the third-country nationals – but a deeply disturbing trend concerns the exclusion of young third-country nationals who “age out” of childhood from repatriation efforts.

In this post, ICRC Advisers Julia Joerin, Vanessa Murphy, and Katerina Kappos lay out why states should include young adults in repatriations as a standard practice, and call on states to reaffirm their commitment to resolving what continues to be one of the most complex and protracted child protection crises of our time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed at extraordinary speed, prompting warnings from within the technology industry itself that advances may be outpacing our ability to understand and control its risks. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in armed conflict. As militaries increasingly explore the integration of AI into weapons and military decision-making, technological capability can easily be mistaken for inevitability: if a system can be built, the assumption follows that it will eventually be deployed. History suggests otherwise. States have made choices before about which technologies of warfare to prohibit, constrain or refrain from using – and they face such a choice again today.

In this post, ICRC Director of International Law, Movement and Partnerships Cordula Droege argues that abstract debates about the need to address the risks of AI should not distract from a concrete and achievable task already before states: establishing legally binding rules on autonomous weapon systems (AWS), including those incorporating AI. Drawing on the realities of deploying complex technologies in the unpredictable conditions of armed conflict, she explains why technical safeguards alone cannot resolve the humanitarian, legal and ethical concerns raised when weapons select and apply force without human intervention. Ahead of the Seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in November, she calls on states to turn more than a decade of work into clear prohibitions and restrictions on AWS, while there is still time to decide what role machines and algorithms should play in war.

As social media and gaming platforms create new interfaces between tech-savvy children and armed actors, new questions should be asked regarding how the law prohibiting child recruitment and use in hostilities can be promoted and enforced online.

In this two-part post, ICRC Advisers Vanessa Murphy, Siobhan Sparkes McNamara, and Tilman Rodenhäuser consider how the digital environment is transforming more traditional forms of child recruitment, give a rough typology of related trends in the information and communications (ICT) environment, identify the relevant international law, and propose recommendations to improve compliance with these laws in the digital age.

As social media and gaming platforms create new interfaces between tech-savvy children and armed actors, new questions should be asked regarding how the law prohibiting child recruitment and use in hostilities can be promoted and enforced online.

In this two-part post, ICRC Advisers Vanessa Murphy, Siobhan Sparkes McNamara, and Tilman Rodenhäuser consider how the digital environment is transforming more traditional forms of child recruitment, give a rough typology of related trends in the information and communications (ICT) environment, identify the relevant international law, and propose recommendations to improve compliance with these laws in the digital age.

A leading media figure and foreign fighter of a notorious group designated as terrorist was sentenced to life imprisonment for “conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, resulting in death”. Although outwardly appearing to quench the thirst of esteemed Lady Justice, the criminal charge reveals only part of the picture: in addition to having provided material support, the defendant was also filmed personally executing two kneeling soldiers, in other words, a foreseeably serious violation of international humanitarian law (IHL). Whilst these factual elements are mentioned with regard to the aggravated circumstances of the conduct and resulting consequences for sentencing considerations, the defendant was only charged with one single criminal count – the terrorist offence. Such is characteristic of the issues this post seeks to address, namely, the tensions that arise when such serious violations of IHL are apparently overlooked, and victims’ calls for justice left unanswered.

In this post and as part of the Emerging Voices series, Natasha Floodgate, PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Geneva, analyses current trends surrounding prosecutions of terrorist offences and war crimes before examining why such practice occurs. In a bid to reconcile the latitude afforded by the international counter-terrorism framework with existing state obligations under IHL and international criminal law (ICL), the author calls for a dualistic approach in order to achieve comprehensive prosecutorial outcomes.

The humanitarian landscape is being reshaped by converging trends, including the rapid adoption of new technologies in warfare, growing restrictions on how and where humanitarians can operate, impacts of the climate crisis and steep reductions in funding.  

How are these trends shaping the needs of communities? What should communities realistically expect from humanitarians making difficult trade-offs in the face of an increasingly fraught operational space and precipitous funding declines? These are some of the key questions the ICRC's new policy report  seeks to answer, based on focus group discussions with communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Ukraine, alongside interviews with humanitarian practitioners and policymakers in and beyond these contexts.

In this post, part of our series “Delivering for people in an evolving humanitarian landscape”, ICRC Senior Policy Advisers Arjun Claire and Avigail Shai focus on what communities said they are experiencing in this changing environment and identify four priorities to meet these community needs and expectations.

Cluster munitions cause harm both at the moment of attack and long after fighting has ended. By scattering submunitions across wide areas, often with high failure rates, they expose civilians to immediate danger while leaving behind unexploded ordnance that can kill and injure for decades. For survivors, the consequences can last a lifetime, extending beyond the initial injury to affect physical and mental health, education, livelihoods and participation in community life. The Convention on Cluster Munitions was created in response to these documented and enduring humanitarian consequences, combining prohibition of the weapon with obligations to clear contaminated areas and assist victims.

In this post, ICRC Legal Adviser Fahad Ahmed and ICRC Physical Rehabilitation Program Coordinator Maarten Abeel examine the humanitarian case for strengthening the implementation and universalizing the Convention ahead of its Third Review Conference in Laos in September 2026. Drawing on the experience of survivors and the role of physical rehabilitation in preventing injury from becoming lifelong exclusion, they argue that the Convention has demonstrated the value of humanitarian disarmament in both preventing future harm and addressing its consequences. They call on states to reject any normalization of cluster munition use, strengthen victim assistance and rehabilitation, and accelerate universalization of the Convention.

International humanitarian law (IHL) is primarily associated with the conduct of hostilities and the protection of people during armed conflict. Yet some of the decisions that determine civilian risk in a future conflict are made long before fighting begins, including where states choose to locate military infrastructure. This raises an important question: what role does IHL play in peacetime decisions that may shape the humanitarian consequences of a future war?

In this post, Gabija Grigaitė examines whether IHL requires states to consider civilian protection when deciding where to locate new military objectives. Using Lithuania’s planned brigade-level military training area as a case study, she argues that the principle of precaution can require measures to be taken in peacetime to reduce the risk of disproportionate civilian harm in a future conflict. The post considers what this preventive dimension of IHL means for decisions about locating military objectives near densely populated areas and critical civilian infrastructure.

Civilian protection is often assessed by whether a person has been warned, evacuated, registered, sheltered or reached with relief. For many persons with disabilities, each measure depends on a wider chain: support persons, assistive devices, accessible communication, transport, medication, electricity, rehabilitation and local services. This post introduces the dependency-chain test and links it to existing international humanitarian law (IHL) rules on proportionality, precautions, warnings, evacuation, displacement, non-discrimination and relief.

Lassi Murto is a Finnish disability-rights advocate, Chair of SMA Finland and Programme and Thematic Advisor at Abilis Foundation. He lives with spinal muscular atrophy and uses personal assistance in daily life. Writing in a personal capacity, he argues that IHL does not need a new legal category for every support relationship. Disability-inclusive interpretation, informed by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), can instead help reveal what existing rules require when civilian safety depends on relationships, devices, services and infrastructure around the person.

As states race to develop autonomous weapons systems, the effort to agree binding international rules on machine decisions over life and death has reached a critical moment.

In this post, Eberechukwu Owuamanam, Jesuit scholastic and humanitarian practitioner, argues that Pope Leo XIV's call to “disarm” artificial intelligence should be taken literally when it comes to such weapons. Writing from a humanitarian perspective shaped by work in the Global South, he contends that no autonomous system should ever select and attack a human being without meaningful human control, warns that automated force will fall hardest on those least able to build or resist it, and calls on states to conclude a binding treaty prohibiting autonomous weapons designed to target people and strictly limiting the rest.