Geneva Conventions Essay

- thanks to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights others treaties, regional human rights instruments, national constitutions and laws were made.

Have we forgotten about the International Covenant of Civil Rights and Political rights (ICCPR), the Convention under Torture and other

According to ICRC, International human rights law is the body of international law intended to advance human rights on social, provincial, and residential levels. As a type of worldwide law, global human rights law is fundamentally comprised of arrangements, understandings between sovereign states to have restricting lawful impact between the gatherings that have consented to them; and standard universal law, guidelines of law got from the predictable direct of states carrying on of the conviction that had the law obliged them to act that way. Other worldwide human rights instruments while not lawfully restricting add to the usage, comprehension and improvement of universal human rights law and have been perceived as a wellspring of political obligation.

Geneva Conventions are rules laid down by various member nations that are applied in times of armed conflict. The Geneva convention seeks to protect people the sick, civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. USA is a member nation of the Geneva Conventions, having signed the 1977 protocols. Under the Geneva Conventions, the torture and abuse of prisoners is barred. Waterboarding is a torture technique used on prisoners, hence, it is also

The Geneva Convention and its participants keep all prisoners of war on a uniformed playing field, to prevent

By the end of the first world war, the international community founded the League of Nations, the first international security organization with the primary goal of maintaining world peace. The first world war saw drastic increases in mankind 's capacity to kill other human beings and cause insurmountable harm to human society and culture. The human condition was drastically different. With a new world war on the horizon, the international community had decided to band together to form a way in which it could help exercise the correct legal disposition and formality to positively influence the world. An international body was crucial after the first world war in order to maintain peace and order as the world picked up the pieces from their injustices. This was also true after the Second world war where the world saw, again, how the cruelties of humanity had to be prevented in order for the international body to prevent the forming of higher casualty rates and human suffering.

Complying with International human rights standards is an easy way of obtaining international support to win this war. It is also the required standard of behavior for any human being.

The Geneva Convention was a series of international treaties concluded between 1864 and 1949, for the sole purpose of improving

In 1925 Geneva Protocool became huge becuase those in the part war wanted to avoided such a deadly war again. 38 Countires signed this agreemnet “that prohibited the use of ‘asphyxiating, poisonous or or other gas’ in warfare” (“Chemical Warfare: Does the use of Chemical Weapons warrant immediate US intervention?” 2). People belive that with out this being set in place that World War 2 wouldve been much more deadly then it already was. This shows the effect of signing the Geneva Protocool and the world leaders had learned from the bad and moved forward from then on out so they became “reluctant to use chemical weapons during World War II than they did during World War I” (“Chemical Warfare: Does the use of Chemical Weapons warrant immediate US intervention?” 3). Despite the effort of the Geneva Protocool it wore off “During the Vietnam War, the US military sprayed herbicide and other chemicals, including agent orange, over the Vietname countryside” (“Chemical Warfare: Does the use of Chemical Weapons warrant immediate US intervention?” 3). Overtime the protocool wore out but it did have some great effects and helped for a few years after it was

Bybee states that the Geneva Conventions are meant to govern what goes on in war between two states, not between a state and a non-state group. Even though Afghanistan has been a part of the Geneva Conventions since 1956, he says that the Taliban that is running the state party is an extremist group and is also illegitimate therefore it does not fall under Geneva III. Bybee also informs that neither does the al-Qaeda terrorist group because it is not a state so therefore it does not fall under Geneva III, and the president does not have to follow the the same rules that the Geneva Conventions require. Bybee argues that it is for the president's discretion as to whether or not we can suspend the Geneva Conventions when it comes to any terrorist group. He shows that many presidents in the past have suspended treaties and this is not any different.

　　Figure 1. A simplify list of human rights created and accepted as an international issue after the Second World War

The Geneva conventions are a group of treaties on treatment on the public, (POWs) prisoners of war and soldiers who are differently concluded hors de combat, or incapable of fighting. The leading convention was admitted by the International committee for relief to the Wounded (that became the International committee for the Red Crescent and Red Cross). This convention made a treaty which was designed to protect sick and wounded soldiers during wartime. The Swiss government agreed to hold the conventions in Geneva, and couple of years later, an alike agreement to protect shipwrecked soldiers was produced. In 1949, subsequent to World War 2, 2 new conventions were added on from the original 2, and all four of them were confirmed by a lot of countries.

The laws of war in particular needed to be discussed because the conduct of war needed to be changed. The world was changing from a world of codes of chivalry to following and setting laws. While at The Hague the laws of war set were the treatment of poisoners of war, treatment of civilians during war, and the procedure of declaring and surrendering wars.

Articles 1, 55, and 56 are the center pieces for promoting and protecting human rights. During the cold war humanitarian intervention went stagnant because the two superpowers who were facing off (US & Russia) were at odds about ideology and this caused world peace to be thrown into turmoil. The UN was very new and did not have the international legal clout to stop either superpower from promoting its system of governance through invasion or indirect military support. The Cold War caused social, economic, and political upheaval globally which allowed for the UN to revise its interpretation of humanitarian intervention. This allowed for a larger consensus among nations about which circumstances required intervention. From 1945 to 1976 five major human rights documents were adopted; The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Genocide Convention, Geneva Convention, Laws of War, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Cultural Economic Civil Rights. The end of the Cold War “liberated the UN which had established 20 new peace keeping missions from 1988-1993, more than it had taken in its entire 40 year history.” (Taha, 14) The major developments of the 1990‘s for international humanitarian

In the pursuit of positive peace for the global community, certain mechanisms are necessary in order to better protect human rights and resolve interstate conflicts. Prior to the events of World War II, a cogent set of laws defining those human rights, much less violations therein were never heard at an international scale. The International Criminal Court has the role as both appellate for justice and voice for peace in the international community but has not yet resolve the contradictory ends of both roles. That contradictory end is that many countries proclaim the necessity of the International Criminal Court as an advocate for conflict resolution and peace advocacy while being resist or outright antagonistic towards the court when their own state has committed those same crimes. To the ends of defending basic universal rights, the International Criminal Court (hereafter ICC) serves that capacity when state level systems cannot or will not act accordingly.