Noninternational Armed Conflict (“Civil War”)

Abstract

A noninternational armed conflict (NIAC) or civil war—as it used to be called in the past—is an armed conflict that occurs within the territory of a particular state, between government armed forces and organized armed groups, or between such groups fighting each other. It is also often called “internal armed conflict,” as opposed to an international armed conflict involving at least two states. NIACs constitute the oldest form of armed conflicts and have become, since the end of the Cold War, more pervasive and more lethal than international armed conflicts. Conflicts since the late 20th century in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as the ongoing ones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, and Syria, are just a few illustrations of the pervasive character of NIACs. International law has, for a long period of time, considered NIAC as a purely intrastate matter despite its external reverberations. However, this stance has evolved following the adoption of the four Geneva Conventions in 1949. The latter codify a corpus of customary rules, commonly known as jus in bello, which regulate the conduct of hostilities in the context of armed conflict by restraining the use by the warring parties of certain means and methods of warfare. Article 3 of each of the four Geneva Conventions introduces NIAC as “armed conflict not of an international character,” the victims of which must be subjected to the minimum standards of protection. In 1977 the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were supplemented by two protocols, which operate a clear distinction between international armed conflict (Additional Protocol I) and NIAC (Additional Protocol II or AP II). AP II defines humanitarian law rules that govern hostilities in internal conflicts. Such rules, together with other relevant treaty provisions and humanitarian principles, constitute the corpus of the jus in bello regulating the conduct of NIACs. A number of internal conflicts that erupted in various countries in the beginning of the 1990s have given ad hoc international tribunals, especially the 1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the 1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the opportunity not only to outline the nature and delimit the frontiers of NIACs, but also to set the conditions under which individual criminal liability may arise as a result of the crimes committed in the context of such conflicts.