Some curiosities in the sources of the law of armed conflict conceived in a general international legal perspective

Abstract

In his search for ‘Self-contained regimes’ in the 1985 issue of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, Bruno Simma addressed diplomatic law, human rights law and the law of the European Community. He did not consider the most traditional of all ‘special branches’ of international law: the law of war. Although present-day authorities no longer see the modern law of armed conflict as a corpus of law seperate from international law, it is often still considered to be a lex specialis within international law. This special character – although certainly in certain areas still controversial – is notably predicated on the (traditionally) sharp distinction between the conditions of peace and war. Although war ‘in a technical sense’, to use Prof. Dinstein's term, has lost its prominence, if indeed it ever had much, the legal relevance of a distinction between war and peace, or armed conflict or not, is still recognised in international legal instruments as well as by many authors.