What are the Geneva Conventions? The rules of war, explained

The Geneva Conventions are four international treaties, agreed in 1949, that set the rules for treating people in war who are not fighting or can no longer fight: wounded and sick soldiers, shipwrecked sailors, prisoners of war and civilians in enemy hands. Every state in the world, 196 in all, has joined them. With three later protocols, they are the core of international humanitarian law, the body of rules that limits the harm armed conflict may do.

In short

• The conventions don't decide whether a war is lawful; they bind every side in it equally, however the war began.
• Each of the four protects a different group, and a shared article sets minimum rules for civil wars.
• The worst violations, called grave breaches, are war crimes that every state must investigate and prosecute or hand over.

This note explains the rules as written, with examples from settled history; it isn't legal advice.

Where did the Geneva Conventions come from?

They began with one witness. In June 1859, a Swiss businessman, Henry Dunant, came upon the battlefield of Solferino in northern Italy, where about 40,000 French, Sardinian and Austrian soldiers had been killed or wounded in a day and left largely without care. His book A Memory of Solferino, of 1862, proposed two things: volunteer relief societies in every country, and a treaty that would protect the wounded and those who cared for them. A committee he helped found in Geneva in 1863 became the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Timeline

Year	Step
1864	First Geneva Convention, signed by 12 states on 22 August: wounded soldiers and medical staff protected, and the red cross on a white ground adopted as their sign
1906	Convention revised and extended
1929	Two conventions: one on the wounded, one on prisoners of war, after the First World War
1949	The four Geneva Conventions, adopted on 12 August, after the Second World War's abuse of prisoners and civilians
1977	Additional Protocols I and II: more protection for civilians, and rules for civil wars
2005	Additional Protocol III: a new emblem, the red crystal

The 1864 text was short. Its first article made military hospitals and ambulances neutral, and its sixth required that wounded soldiers be cared for "to whatever nation they may belong", as the text kept by Yale's Avalon Project records. That principle, care for the enemy as for your own, runs through every convention since. Dunant shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

Who does each convention protect?

The 1949 treaties divide the people who need protection into four groups, one convention each.

Convention	Protects	Examples of its rules
First	Wounded and sick members of armed forces on land	Collect and care for them without distinction; respect medical staff, units and transport
Second	Wounded, sick and shipwrecked members of armed forces at sea	The same duties at sea; protects hospital ships
Third	Prisoners of war	Humane treatment; give only name, rank, number and date of birth; food, shelter, letters; release at the end of hostilities
Fourth	Civilians in enemy hands, including in occupied territory	No hostage-taking, collective punishment or forced deportation; occupiers must keep order and supply basic needs

One article appears in all four, Common Article 3, and it reaches further. It applies to armed conflicts "not of an international character", civil wars and fights between a state and armed groups, and requires that anyone not taking part in the fighting be treated humanely: no murder, torture, hostage-taking or execution without a proper trial. Additional Protocol II of 1977 adds to it for larger civil wars, and Protocol I extends the rules for wars between states, including limits on attacks that harm civilians. The protocols are less widely joined: the United States, for one, signed both in 1977 but has ratified neither.

The conventions protect fighters too, from the moment they stop fighting. A soldier who surrenders, or is too badly wounded to fight, may not be attacked.

How do the conventions apply to a real case?

Lawyers ask a fixed sequence of questions. Take a soldier captured by the other side's army during a war between two states:

1. Is there an armed conflict? Yes, between two states. That makes it an international armed conflict, so all four conventions apply, and Protocol I too if both states have joined it.
2. Which group is the person in? A captured member of the armed forces is a prisoner of war, so the Third Convention governs: humane treatment, no coercion to give more than name, rank, service number and date of birth, visits from the ICRC, release and return home "without delay after the cessation of active hostilities".
3. What if the soldier were wounded? Then the First Convention also applies: medical care without distinction from the captor's own wounded.
4. What if the fighting were a civil war instead? Then only Common Article 3, and Protocol II if its conditions are met, would apply. There is no legal prisoner-of-war status in a civil war, though the person must still be treated humanely and tried fairly if charged.
5. Was a grave breach committed? If the prisoner were tortured or killed, every state party would be bound to search for those responsible and either prosecute them or hand them to a state that will.

Even the "without delay" rule can be hard to apply. At the end of the Korean War, the rule ran into prisoners who refused to go home, and the two sides argued for more than a year over whether returning them by force was what the convention required.

What is a grave breach?

A grave breach is one of the most serious violations of the conventions, listed in the treaties themselves. Against protected people, it includes willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, and willfully causing great suffering. The Third and Fourth Conventions add forcing a prisoner or civilian to serve in the enemy's forces and denying them a fair trial, and the Fourth adds hostage-taking and unlawful deportation or confinement. Extensive destruction or seizure of property that military necessity doesn't justify, carried out unlawfully and wantonly, is a grave breach under the First, Second and Fourth.

Grave breaches are war crimes. Each state party must pass laws to punish them and must search for suspects, whatever their nationality and wherever the crime took place. That makes them one of the few crimes under universal jurisdiction by treaty. They are also among the war crimes that the International Criminal Court can try.

What do the emblems mean?

The red cross, the red crescent and, since 2005, the red crystal mark the people, vehicles and buildings that give medical care in war and must not be attacked. The emblems are not religious symbols, though the red crescent was adopted by the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s; the crystal, a red frame shaped like a square standing on its point, was created as a sign free of any national or religious meaning. Misusing an emblem, for example to disguise soldiers or weapons, is a violation of the conventions, and doing so to kill or wound an enemy is the war crime of perfidy.

Why are the Geneva Conventions so often broken?

The rules are close to universal; enforcement is not. No international police force exists to apply them. The system relies on states training their armies, punishing their own soldiers, and pressing other states to comply, a duty Common Article 1 states as to "respect and to ensure respect" for the conventions. The ICRC visits prisoners and raises violations, but in confidence, so that governments keep letting it in. Prosecutions in national courts and international tribunals have happened, from the Nuremberg trials to the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but only for a small share of the crimes committed.

Defenders of the system point out that violations make the news and compliance does not: prisoners exchanged, wounded treated and aid let through every day in wars around the world. The conventions sit beside the rules on genocide and the wider body of human rights law, which continues to apply in war, and they are part of international law that almost every state accepts on paper.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name the group each of the four 1949 conventions protects.
• Why doesn't a fighter in a civil war get prisoner-of-war status, and what protects them instead?
• What must every state do when it finds someone suspected of a grave breach on its territory?

Sources

• Geneva Conventions and their commentaries — International Committee of the Red Cross
• Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field — Avalon Project, Yale Law School, 1864
• Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War — International Committee of the Red Cross, 1949
• Henry Dunant, biographical — Nobel Prize Outreach
• Geneva Conventions — Wikipedia