The end of intense combat during armed conflict – whether permanent or temporary –does not automatically correlate with an end to human suffering. The last four posts in our series ‘IHL in the aftermath’ aimed to paint a scene of the human suffering in the aftermath of conflict, but also proposed some solutions.

In this fifth instalment, ICRC Chief Protection Officer Christian Cardon de Lichtbuer, ICRC Head of Operational Law Unit Thomas de Saint Maurice, and ICRC Senior Legal Adviser Kelisiana Thynne propose some concrete recommendations as to what can be done before, during and after conflict to reduce human suffering.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/09/13/aftermath-battle…lenges-solutions/

‘What I know is that for me, for many, the war will not be over until more is done to restore us and our town to normality’. Conflict is not just about international humanitarian law (IHL) and how it is applied. During conflict and in its aftermath, the voice of the civilians affected should be considered.

In this post, the fourth in our ‘IHL in the aftermath’ series, ICRC Senior Legal Adviser Kelisiana Thynne addresses post-conflict challenges for individuals and their families through the fictional lens of someone living in the aftermath with her family.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/09/07/fictional-aftermath-conflict/

The recently-launched ICRC blog series ‘Back to basics: humanitarian principles in contemporary armed conflict’ aims to inspire discussion and debate about the relevance of, and challenges to, the humanitarian principles in current times. For some, that phrasing might imply a worrying move back to a time when humanitarian action was conceptualized in its most simplistic form, and the complex interplay between such action and social dynamics like gender, diversity, race and structural discrimination was seen as beyond the responsibility of humanitarian actors.

In this post, ICRC Policy Adviser Ariana Lopes Morey reflects on what ‘back to basics’ means when it comes to gender and humanitarian action, arguing that in order to live up to the basic principles themselves we must strengthen our capacity to bring a gender lens to all aspects of the humanitarian endeavor.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/09/01/gender-fundamental-principles/

Though it cannot be up to women alone to capture gendered impacts in treaty texts and outcome documents, their perspective has often helped to pave the way. Research shows that women’s participation in a negotiation process is more likely to lead to the inclusion of gender provisions.

In this post, part of a series on Gender and Conflict co-hosted by the ICRC and Just Security, ICRC Senior Arms Adviser Véronique Christory shares a personal reflection on how the involvement of women in disarmament negotiations has grown over the last 20 years, the tools that have helped spur this advancement, and the ups and downs along the way.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/08/25/catching-curve-p…mament-diplomacy/

In seemingly a moment, a city can go from being prosperous and peaceful to completely ravaged by war. Depending on how a conflict plays out and how the parties fulfil their IHL obligations before, during or after battle, inhabitants of a city can experience the aftermath of war in very different ways.

In this post, part of the ‘IHL in the Aftermath’ series, ICRC Senior Legal Adviser, Kelisiana Thynne, paints this is cautionary tale, setting the scene for further discussion about the aftermath of conflict and the continuing IHL and other obligations States and parties to a conflict have.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/08/16/a-tale-of-two-ci…termath-conflict/

Too often the term “prisoner of war” (PoW) conjures up black-and-white images of soldiers detained in the Second World War. Recent events have brought PoWs back into the fore of the public consciousness, in particular how they must be treated and what rights they are entitled to in contemporary conflicts. For example, what is the role of social media in respecting their dignity? What is the role of the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency and States’ National Information Bureaux today? Given developments in international human rights law and international and domestic criminal law, may PoWs be tried for their conduct during hostilities and, if so, what guarantees are they entitled to?

In this post published to mark the anniversary of the 1949 Geneva Conventions Ellen Policinski, a legal adviser working on the ICRC’s project to update the Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, highlights some aspects of the Third Geneva Convention (GCIII) that may be particularly relevant today, including some of the findings of the updated ICRC Commentary, and points readers towards some resources that digest the findings of this once-in-a-generation study.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/08/11/prisoners-of-war…-its-negotiation/

As the armed conflict in Ukraine persists, rapidly unfolding events have entailed grave implications for civilians trapped in the crisis, such as death, injury and displacement from their homes and normal lives, to name but a few. In some areas in Ukraine, those who have remained in their homes have woken up to find that the areas in which they live are no longer under the control of the Ukrainian government but under the control of Russian forces.

In this post, ICRC Legal Adviser Mikhail Orkin and ICRC Senior Legal Adviser Tristan Ferraro take a closer look at how IHL regulates a situation of occupation and provides protections for the civilian inhabitants of an occupied territory.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/07/25/armed-conflict-u…cupied-territory/

Silenced guns do not mend the lives of those who have survived the violence. Declarations of victory and the laying down of arms do not by themselves restore electricity and clean water; nor do they reconnect families with their missing or detained relatives; nor do they diffuse unexploded bombs; nor do they offer protection from the violent retribution of the victors.

In this post, part of our series ‘IHL in the aftermath’, ICRC Senior Legal Advisers Ramin Mahnad and Kelisiana Thynne outline the reality that many people remain vulnerable to harm long after the fighting has temporarily or permanently ended, and propose that there are already legal solutions to many of these problems that must be identified and applied.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/07/21/silenced-guns-li…-end-of-conflict/

We have all seen the despair, dismay, and disaster of war. But what happens when the armed conflict appears to be over? It may be a time for peace, but there will often be pockets of hostilities, rogue forces, continuing damage, unexploded weapons that have not been removed, and lives that cannot go back to so-called normality.

In this post, ICRC Senior Legal Adviser Kelisiana Thynne and ICRC’s Head of Legal Advisers to Operations Thomas de Saint Maurice launch a new series, ‘IHL in the aftermath of conflict’ to raise the profile of relevant IHL obligations in post-conflict scenarios and highlight the humanitarian consequences of armed conflict in the aftermath of conflict that might be more challenging from a legal perspective.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/07/11/ihl-aftermath-conflicts/

The uptake of gender considerations into military missions across the world has largely been uneven and incremental. This is likely due in part to the lack of an overarching theory of how gender is relevant to operations; a theory we could use to interrogate data sets and analysis to provide actionable intelligence. Operational risk is a promising candidate.

In this post, part of a series on Gender and Conflict co-hosted by the ICRC and Just Security, Jody M. Prescott, a lecturer at the University of Vermont, sets out the need to take a different approach to incorporating gender considerations in military operations, one that uses gender analysis not just to assess risk to gendered population groups such as women and girls, but risk to missions posed by the failure to consider gender.

Read the full blog post here: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2022/07/07/militaries-theory-gender-operational-relevance/