Page 3189 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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Both the documents mentioned mark a point in time when great injustices were no longer treated as unavoidable but, through supremacy of reason and determination of will, a person or groups of people made a statement of such force of intellect and such compelling compassion that all could see the wisdom of the change and none could resist the correctness of the cause. In short, they are documents after which the world could and would never be the same again.
In the case of the first Geneva convention, we are talking about an observer who witnessed the horrors of war and the mistreatment of combatants after the fighting had ceased. He saw not enemies or combatants but people—dreadfully wounded and mercilessly left to their fate. It occurred to him that, even in times of open hostility, the nature of humankind should be able to avoid the descent to monstrosity.
This led to the drafting of the first of the documents that have had worldwide ramifications. The Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field was signed at Geneva on 22 August 1864. Ratifications were exchanged at Geneva on 22 June 1865, and the declaration of accession was signed by the President of the United States on 1 March 1882.
It has led to a belief in the neutrality of medical assistance, even in war zones—a revolutionary idea at the time. It also led to the awarding of the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 and the establishment of the Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations, which have become some of the most recognised and respected symbols of neutrality and compassion throughout the world.
One of the most important things the first convention did was introduce the validity of international obligations under the law, which has in turn led to many more conventions on all manner of issues. The notion of international law itself was in fact revolutionary.
Since then there had been other treaties and conventions—until it became the document we are recognising on its 60th anniversary, the Geneva conventions of 1949. The four core documents that make up the 1949 Geneva conventions were collated after the end of World War II—a conflict that, despite the introduction of the original conventions, saw extraordinary brutality.
However, the conventions were also the bedrock of many of the claims brought against perpetrators, and they introduced to us the term “war crime”—again a notion that was without precedent at the time but is now part of the common lexicon of international law.
It also solidified the liability or command responsibility—that is, ordering an act against the conventions or protocols accrued guilt as much as carrying them out personally—and the failure of the so-called Nuremberg defence—that is, claiming that one was simply following orders would not generate an immunity from prosecution.
There are two important additional types of documents which form part of the package: the common articles and the additional protocols. The common articles
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