International principles of combating the illegal use for profit of humanitarian aid, charitable donations, or free aid

Abstract

The article is devoted to an extremely relevant topic - the characteristics of the international principles of combating the illegal use for profit of humanitarian aid, charitable donations, or free aid. It has been proven that much of international humanitarian assistance is based on the premise that armed conflict will inevitably resume, but that all parties involved can take steps to minimize the hardships faced by civilians caught in the chaos. Nevertheless, the parties involved in the conflicts constantly do not fulfill their demands. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly noted that the right to humanitarian assistance is the core of ergo omnes obligations.
 The article establishes that the legal mechanisms, the current jurisdictional mechanisms for the international protection of the right to humanitarian aid, require significant time costs and the consent of the state to provide it with humanitarian aid. Political mechanisms are particularly effective in resolving disputes of this type because they are more flexible and can be used to combat the behavior of non-state parties. After all, a significant negative factor during an active armed conflict is that a person's right to humanitarian aid mainly depends on the political will of states to use the means available at their disposal to ensure implementation and execution. It turns out that the procedure for considering interstate complaints regarding the violation of the right to humanitarian assistance involves a long process, as well as the complete exhaustion of national remedies. Transferring a case to the European Court of Human Rights is also a long-term process that does not provide for temporary procedures for settling the situation. In such a case, the role of the courts is not preventive and cannot contribute to the prevention of violations of the right to humanitarian assistance. In addition, if judicial protection is always evaluated as a traditional way of protecting violated rights, then there are also alternative ones, for example, a monitoring procedure that focuses on the analysis of "situations" in which human rights are violated, considering the frequency of violations over time, and not the number of victims. This makes it possible to identify even individual violations of human rights.