The Conventional Weapons Convention: A modest but useful treaty

Abstract

The author commenced an earlier study of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons (Conventional Weapons Convention) by quoting the late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht's remark: “If international law is, in some ways, the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law”. He then carried Lauterpacht's statement one stage further to suggest that the vanishing point of the law of war was most likely to be found in the body of law restricting the use of weapons. Shortly after writing these words, the author discovered that a colleague had also used the remarks of Sir Hersch and asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was the law of air warfare. More recently, the author read a paper by a younger colleague in which Sir Hersch was quoted once again, but this time it was asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was to be found in the body of law regulating nuclear weapons. The two lessons one might derive from this brief tale are that serious students of the law of war rarely have grandiose expectations for their discipline and that a good quotation is always reusable.