Episode Details

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.