eli5 How does the Geneva convention work? How can it be enforced if nations are already at war? What incentive do armies have for following it?

Question

I mean there are no referees on the battlefield.

In: 3

Answer 1

Lots of interesting and amusing answers here.

I did moot court back in law school. Basically, the Convention, or any international law or treaty to which countries are bound to, act as laws in the same way as local or municipal laws.

If you kill and torture someone, you get arrested and go to court. The lawyers will cite the specific laws you violated (i.e., murder, etc.) and then proceed the case against you under the legal precedents surrounding that particular law.

Similarly, if a country does something that’s in violation of an international law, the country affected can go to the ICJ or whichever and file a case against that country. The specific violations must be cited and then the country must argue their case based on the legal basis it used to push it’s case.

This can be tricky because if a country is not a signatory to a treaty, it cannot be bound by it. There are also instances where a country is a signatory, but have not yet ratified the treaty.

In these cases, your best bet is to cite principles of international law, but that’s a story for another time.

So, how can it be enforced? The truth of the matter is that it’s not. The UN is supposed to be the one to enforce it, right? But the UN also has to respect a country’s sovereignty, so in most cases, it really can’t do crap.

You can go to the ICJ and the ICJ may say that Country A is right and Country B is wrong, so Country B must do this.

But Country B, with its sovereign power, can just say “No”. Yes, it sometimes also depends on how powerful a country is to be able to convincingly say “no” (e.g., USA, China).

The only consequence this can really have is that it will damage Country B’s diplomatic relations with other countries. And if you’re a powerful country, would you care?

There’s really no incentive. In times of war, you can really say that “anything goes”. The only reason some countries don’t go all out is because and be dirty is because they don’t want the other party to do the same.

For example, it’s not sound for Ukraine or Russia to use deadly gas or germ warfare because this will give the other the greenlight to do the same.

There’s really a lot more to say on this subject, but I’ll leave it here.