Today’s 71st anniversary of the 1949 Geneva Conventions is an opportunity to recall once more the vital role of international humanitarian law (IHL) in upholding human dignity in situations of armed conflict. While the Conventions, and IHL more generally, frame crucial limits on the suffering that may be inflicted in armed conflict, it is only through faithful dissemination, implementation and respect of IHL that better protection for victims of armed conflicts can be achieved.

In this blog post – a joint contribution by customary law experts and researchers from the ICRC and the British Red Cross – the authors reflect on the role of the Geneva Conventions and wider IHL in the regulation of contemporary armed conflicts, and on the contribution that one IHL tool in particular, the customary IHL database, which shares the August 12th birthday with the Conventions, aims to make.

The testimonies of the victims and survivors of nuclear weapons prompt us to imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable and give voice to the unspeakable suffering caused by atomic bombs.

Marking 75 years this week since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Magnus Løvold, Policy Adviser in the Arms Unit of the ICRC’s Legal Division, calls on us to honor and remember the testimonies of survivors exposing nuclear weapons for what they really are: Nothing more – and nothing less – than horrific and unjustifiable tools of war that must be prohibited and eliminated.

The Third Geneva Convention is the most comprehensive legal framework protecting prisoners of war. Adopted in 1949 against the backdrop of immense suffering during the Second World War, it was a remarkable multilateral achievement, with additional and stronger protections than had ever been agreed upon for prisoners of war. Today, it is universally ratified.

In this post, Cordula Droege, Chief Legal Officer of the ICRC, outlines ten of the most important protections that the Convention affords prisoners of war, and how they can be understood today in light of the recently updated Commentary.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the United States, and the protests that have swept parts of the world since, we find ourselves face-to-face with a long overdue racial reckoning. We are now at the stage where institutions are transitioning from hearing out employees’ experiences to deciding what they will publicly commit to doing in order to combat discrimination and systemic inequities. But what does it mean to operate equitably and be anti-racist? And how do these terms apply to humanitarian action?

In this post, Saman Rejali, Thematic Editor at the International Review of the Red Cross and lead for the ICRC’s Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Committee[1], argues that by acknowledging the role neo-colonial legacies continue to play in the humanitarian sector, and interpreting the humanitarian principles to account for equitable treatment, over equal treatment, the humanitarian sector can tailor its operational and institutional systems to better serve people affected by armed conflict and other situations of violence.