I always hear about it but I genuinely do not know what it is. I tried looking it up but I still don’t understand..
In: Other
One of the problems when fighting wars is that you want to retain some morality, but not if it gives your enemy an advantage.
So lets say you don’t want to shoot ambulances for moral reasons, but you also don’t want the enemy to just use ambulances as troop or weapon transportation.
The way to get around this would be to agree with the enemy that if they don’t use ambulances to transport weapons, you won’t shoot ambulances. And they agree to the same thing. Obviously if you catch the enemy using ambulances to transport weapons, you are no longer obligated to hold your fire.
The Geneva convention is a giant list of things like this relating to the treatment of non combatants, and who is a non combatant etc.
Most nations on earth have already signed at least some of it, meaning if they go to war they have already agreed in advance to, for example, not move weapons in ambulances and not shoot ambulances.
There are equivalent, somewhat less signed conventions that cover things like weapons (for example the convention on cluster munitions, or the Hague convention, or the Geneva protocol). If you ever see someone saying “This weapon violates the Geneva convention” they are lying. It might violate *a different convention that the involved parties may or may not be signatures to*, but the Geneva convention cares only about *who* you target, not what you target them *with*.
Latest Answers