Concept
Geneva Conventions
Related concepts (63)
Multilateral treaty
A multilateral treaty is a treaty to which two or more sovereign states are parties. Each party owes the same obligations to all other parties, except to the extent that they have stated reservations. Examples of multilateral treaties include the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Geneva Conventions, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. A bilateral treaty is a treaty between two states.
Declaration of war
A declaration of war is a formal act by which one state announces existing or impending war activity against another. The declaration is a performative speech act (or the signing of a document) by an authorized party of a national government, in order to create a state of war between two or more states. The legality of who is competent to declare war varies between nations and forms of government. In many nations, that power is given to the head of state or sovereign.
Reprisal
A reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. Since the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (AP 1), reprisals in the laws of war are extremely limited, as they commonly breach the rights of non-combatants. The word came from French, where it originally meant "act of taking back", for example, raiding back the equivalent of cattle lost to an enemy raid.
Guantanamo military commission
The Guantanamo military commissions were established by President George W. Bush – through a military order – on November 13, 2001, to try certain non-citizen terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison. To date, there have been a total of eight convictions in the military commissions, six through plea agreements with the defendants. Several of the eight convictions have been overturned in whole or in part on appeal, mostly by U.S. federal courts.
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva Conventions ratified by the U.S.
Command responsibility
In the practice of international law, command responsibility (also the Yamashita standard, the Medina standard, and superior responsibility) is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes, whereby a commanding officer (military) and a superior officer (civil) is legally responsible for the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed by his subordinates; thus, a commanding officer always is accountable for the acts of commission and the acts of omission of his soldiers.
Nuremberg principles
The Nuremberg principles are a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. The document was created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations to codify the legal principles underlying the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi party members following World War II. Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
Targeted killing
Targeted killing is a form of assassination carried out by governments outside a judicial procedure or a battlefield. Since the late 20th century, the legal status of targeted killing has become a subject of contention within and between various nations. Historically, at least since the mid-eighteenth century, Western thinking has generally considered the use of assassination as a tool of statecraft to be illegal.
Jus ad bellum
Jus ad bellum (ju:s or dʒʌs) refers to "the conditions under which States may resort to war or to the use of armed force in general." This is distinct from the set of rules that ought to be followed during a war, known as jus in bello, which govern the behavior of parties in an armed conflict.
Military occupation
Military occupation, also known as belligerent occupation or simply occupation, is the effective military control by a ruling power over a territory that is outside of that power's sovereign territory. The territory is then known as the occupied territory and the ruling power the occupant. Occupation is distinguished from annexation and colonialism by its intended temporary duration. While an occupant may set up a formal military government in the occupied territory to facilitate its administration, it is not a necessary precondition for occupation.