The Dilemma Of International Humanitarian Law: What And How It Protects

Abstract

Basically the International Humanitarian Law regime is to prevent armed conflicts and war crime, considering the catastrophic effects of wars generally. This laudable objective clearly underscored the kind of optimism most states expressed on this noble cause. In the contrary, a study of International Humanitarian Law regime over the years has left scholars more critical. This has led to divergent views about who it protects and how. While some studies questioned its evolution to be Eurocentric, some others faulted it to be unviable, non-coercive and unenforceable. This paper constitutes a scholarship on these studies and it contends that, the international humanitarian law is a branch of public international law that deals with humanitarian interventions in wartime and war crimes. The legal framework of the international humanitarian law is rooted in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The missing link is that, the critics of the international humanitarian law based their argument on the operations of the judicial organ of the international humanitarian law, the International Criminal Court. The critics had seen the Court as a coercive tool in the hands of the western countries to witch-hunt African leaders. However, the operations of the Court should not be used as a premise to diminish the legality of the law to protect its legal personality as provided for in the Conventions. And it does not in any way invalidate the international humanitarian law of being law. This is the angle that this paper stands differently from the previous studies.