On August 12, 2024, ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger issued a statement marking the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions. “In a divided world,” she said, “the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law embody universal values that preserve lives and dignity.” Even the birthday message carried a warning. The ICRC said international humanitarian law was “under strain” and declared that “the world must recommit to this robust, protective framework for armed conflict.”
Six weeks later, the ICRC released its Challenges Report. It counted more than 120 armed conflicts worldwide. It described systematic attacks on medical facilities, detainees subjected to torture, civilians treated as military targets. The report restated what the ICRC has said since its first such report in 2003: “the single most important challenge to IHL is the lack of respect for it.”
Read together, the two documents describe this situation: 196 states are party to the Geneva Conventions — universal ratification, a reach matched by only a handful of treaties. Yet the world has more than 120 armed conflicts in which those treaties are being violated, and 34 people wanted on International Criminal Court arrest warrants remain at large, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu among them.
Why states violate these rules is no mystery: for most of them, little happens when they do. The harder question is how a legal framework achieves near-universal ratification and near-systematic violation at the same time, without this being understood as a design failure. Traced back to its origins, the enforcement architecture runs through a Protecting Power system that states have rarely switched on since 1949, and never in the long wars of Korea, Vietnam or Iran–Iraq; through a Fact-Finding Commission that has never made public a grave-breaches investigation; and through the ICC’s jurisdictional map, with its deliberate gaps. Followed to the end, it describes an arrangement that works roughly as its signatories built it to.
What the text says
Each of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 covers one group of people. Geneva Convention I covers the wounded and sick in land warfare. GC II covers the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked at sea. GC III covers prisoners of war; its Article 17 limits what a prisoner is bound to disclose (name, rank, date of birth, serial number), and Article 130 enumerates grave breaches. GC IV covers civilians who find themselves in enemy hands, whether in occupied territory or on a belligerent’s own soil: it prohibits collective punishment, deportation from occupied territory, and destruction of property there unless military operations make it absolutely necessary.
Three Additional Protocols followed, the first two in 1977. AP I codified the principles of distinction and proportionality for international armed conflict: the requirement to distinguish combatants from civilians and to avoid attacks whose harm to civilians is excessive relative to military advantage. AP II extended minimum protections to non-international armed conflicts. AP III, in 2005, added the Red Crystal as a recognized protective emblem.
Common Article 3 appears identically in all four Conventions. It sets minimum standards for civil wars and internal conflicts — protection of non-combatants, humane treatment, prohibition on torture and “outrages upon personal dignity.” In 1986, the International Court of Justice, in Nicaragua v. United States, confirmed that Common Article 3 reflects customary international law binding all states regardless of treaty ratification.
The grave breaches regime, spelled out in a matching article of each of the four Conventions, is specific, though the list varies by treaty. All four cover willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, and willfully causing great suffering. The prisoner-of-war and civilian Conventions add compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of the hostile power, and the civilian Convention adds unlawful deportation or transfer and taking hostages. The list is a criminal one. States are required to search for persons alleged to have committed grave breaches and bring them before their own courts or hand them over for trial elsewhere.
More states are party to the Conventions than belong to the United Nations. Some rules, such as proportionality, call for hard judgments in the field, but the core prohibitions on torture, hostage-taking and the killing of prisoners are unambiguous, so the gap between the text and the practice cannot be blamed on vagueness.
Even Common Article 3 was a hard sell. At the 1949 diplomatic conference, states resisted strenuously. Granting legal protections to non-state armed groups, such as rebels, insurgents and anti-colonial movements, meant implicitly recognizing them as parties with rights. The final text includes explicit language to address this fear: compliance “shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.” States could follow the rules without conceding that the people they were fighting against had any legitimate standing. The same sovereignty-preserving logic runs through the enforcement architecture described below.
What a Protecting Power is supposed to do
Article 8 of the first three Conventions (Article 9 of the fourth) sets out the Protecting Power system: a neutral state, appointed to safeguard a belligerent's interests, supervises the application of the Conventions and relays communications between the parties. Later articles give its delegates teeth. GC III, Article 126, and GC IV, Article 143, entitle them to go to every place where prisoners of war or interned civilians are held and to interview detainees without witnesses. If no Protecting Power is in place, Article 10 (Article 11 of GC IV) provides for a substitute, and a humanitarian organization such as the ICRC may take on the humanitarian functions. In more than seven decades it has been filled only a handful of times, most clearly in the 1982 Falklands War, when Switzerland acted for Britain and Brazil for Argentina.The machinery that doesn’t run
Three outside checks were meant to watch states at war: neutral Protecting Powers, a standing fact-finding commission and the ICRC.
Protecting Powers
Protecting Powers have been appointed in only a handful of conflicts since 1949. There were none for Korea, Vietnam, the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf Wars, the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza. The system belongs to wars between states; in purely internal wars, such as Syria’s, it does not apply at all. The four Conventions say they are to be applied “with the co-operation and under the scrutiny of the Protecting Powers,” and Additional Protocol I makes it a duty of each party, from the beginning of such a conflict, to designate them or accept a substitute. In practice, almost no party ever has.
The Falklands case shows how optional the rule has become. Even there, in the first clear-cut use of Protecting Powers since the Second World War, the two neutrals performed no major functions in the military area. The mechanism runs only when both belligerents choose to let a neutral state look over their shoulders.
During the Iran–Iraq War, the ICRC’s access to prisoners of war was partial and repeatedly cut off: its work for Iraqi prisoners held in Iran was suspended from October 1984 until 1986. The Protecting Power mechanism, had it operated, would have provided the kind of neutral verification that was absent. Instead, even the fallback monitor was kept at the door. Tens of thousands of soldiers spent years in captivity, and repatriations dragged on long after the 1988 ceasefire.
The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission
The IHFFC was created under Article 90 of Additional Protocol I, and was formally constituted in 1991. Its mandate: to investigate alleged grave breaches and serious violations of IHL. The Commission can act only where the states concerned have accepted its competence — either in advance, through a declaration under Article 90, or for the specific case.
Since then, the Commission has been formally activated twice. In 2017, the OSCE asked it to lead a forensic investigation in eastern Ukraine into an explosion that killed an OSCE paramedic and injured two monitors. It concluded that the blast likely came from a recently laid anti-tank mine, a finding with real forensic value, though not a grave-breaches investigation. In 2024, after a strike on World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza killed seven people, including a Polish national, the government of Poland signed a memorandum of understanding with the IHFFC regarding the incident. Poland was not a party to the conflict. The Commission delivered a confidential report to the Polish government that October; its findings have not been made public. In August 2026, the Israeli military closed its own case, finding “no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct,” a decision Poland said left it “greatly disappointed.” In thirty-five years, the Commission has never made public a grave-breaches investigation.
The ICRC’s bargain
Among the many aid groups working in war zones, the ICRC holds a treaty right no other has: in wars between states, the Conventions entitle its delegates to visit prisoners of war and interned civilians. Its delegates visit detention facilities, monitor treatment of wounded combatants, trace missing persons. This access produces results. But its operating approach, which it calls “bilateral and confidential,” means that when delegates observe violations, they communicate findings privately to the responsible authorities. As a rule, nothing is published and the findings stay with the authorities concerned.
The ICRC explains why: if parties believed the ICRC would make findings public, they would be likely to exclude the ICRC from access. A body known to publish what it sees would rarely be granted the access that allows it to see anything.
Either the ICRC stays silent and keeps its access to detainees, or it speaks and risks losing the rooms where detainees are held. Confidentiality is the ICRC’s own policy, not a treaty condition, and in many wars no treaty right of access exists at all. Access is then negotiated with whoever holds the prisoners, and those authorities open their doors more readily to a visitor who reports to them alone. The ICRC accepts the bargain, because the alternative risks leaving those detainees with no one.
The ICRC reserves the right to go public, but only as an exception: when violations are major and repeated, and only once it “has exhausted every other reasonable means” of persuading the party responsible. It has done so, occasionally. But the option carries a direct cost, because it puts at risk the very access on which its work depends.
Universal jurisdiction
The Conventions require states to prosecute or extradite any person accused of grave breaches, regardless of the nationality of the accused or the location of the crime. The best-known test of universal jurisdiction in practice ran through German criminal law rather than the Conventions’ grave-breaches clause: in January 2022, the Koblenz Higher Regional Court convicted Anwar Raslan, a Syrian intelligence colonel who headed the investigations section of Branch 251 of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate, of crimes against humanity. The court found that some 4,000 detainees were tortured under his authority and held him responsible as a co-perpetrator of torture, 27 murders, and rape and sexual assault. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Germany’s Federal Court of Justice upheld the verdict in 2024.
Raslan held a mid-level post in one branch of that system. The officials who designed and authorized it remain beyond arrest. In May 2024 a Paris court, trying the deaths of two French-Syrian citizens, sentenced three of the most senior, among them the security chief Ali Mamlouk and Jamil Hassan, head of Air Force Intelligence, to life imprisonment in absentia; none of them is in custody. It convicted a former head of state, Chad’s Hissène Habré, only because he had fled to Senegal, where a special court tried him in 2016. Universal jurisdiction catches the defendants a prosecuting state can arrest; those still sheltered by a government stay out of its reach.
The court that cannot reach
Under the Rome Statute, the ICC has jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of a member state, by a national of a member state, or on the territory of a non-member state that accepts the Court’s jurisdiction by declaration. A UN Security Council referral can also extend jurisdiction regardless of membership.
The United States, Russia, and China are not members. Crimes committed by nationals of those three states, on the territory of non-member states, fall within ICC jurisdiction only if the territorial state lodges an Article 12(3) declaration accepting the Court’s jurisdiction or the UNSC refers the situation. The veto power in the Security Council is held by five states: the US, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France. Three of those five veto holders sit outside the ICC — and, as the states most capable of producing or shielding large-scale violations, they hold the power to block the Council route that could bring their nationals within its reach.
At the 1998 Rome Conference, Ambassador David Scheffer, the Clinton administration’s lead negotiator and head of the US delegation, pressed for an amendment requiring the consent of a suspect’s state of nationality before the Court could act. The conference refused: when the US asked for a vote, a motion to take no action was “overwhelmingly carried.” Scheffer set the position, and its defeat, out on the record before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee days after the vote. It had been the explicit American position throughout the negotiations. The US voted against the Rome Statute. Clinton signed the treaty at the end of 2000, which preserved US ability to participate in the Court’s development without ratifying. The Bush administration “unsigned” in May 2002, formally notifying the UN that the US did not intend to ratify. It then negotiated Article 98 bilateral immunity agreements with more than 100 countries, under which those states would not surrender US nationals to the Court. Rome did not give Washington the shield it asked for, so the US built its protection outside the treaty.
Security Council referrals have produced two ICC situations: Darfur in 2005 and Libya in 2011. The Darfur referral was adopted 11–0, with Algeria, Brazil, China and the United States abstaining, and it carried a clause reserving to non-member contributing states exclusive jurisdiction over their personnel for acts tied to Council- or African Union-authorized operations in Sudan. The Libya referral was adopted unanimously. A referral for Syria was vetoed, and none was attempted for Yemen. Between October 2023 and September 2025 the United States vetoed six Security Council drafts on Gaza, all but the first demanding a ceasefire.
The overrepresentation of African defendants in ICC proceedings is a documented pattern: most of those indicted and all convictions to date involve situations on the African continent. Much of it follows from reach: membership and the Security Council veto decide where the Court has jurisdiction, and Article 98 agreements limit who can be surrendered to it. Prosecutorial choices shaped it too. Several African cases reached the Court because the governments concerned referred them, and where the Court could act against Western forces, the Prosecutor has twice stepped back: in 2020 the office closed the preliminary examination of British conduct in Iraq without an investigation, judging that UK authorities had acted on the cases themselves, and in 2021 it deprioritized the conduct of US personnel in the Afghanistan investigation to focus on the Taliban and Islamic State. The charge of selective targeting, pressed by the African Union among others, remains a live dispute. The result is a court whose judges have handed down 15 convictions, all in African situations, in 24 years of operation. In those same years the United States and its European allies fought long occupation wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, detainees were tortured in US custody, and no ICC proceedings produced a single charge against their personnel.
The warrants that cannot be served
In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for the war crime of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children. In November 2024, it issued warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. These broke with the historical pattern: the Court acted against a sitting leader of a P5 state and against the leader of a close US ally. Neither Israel nor Russia would surrender subjects for trial. The warrants generated immediate political counter-pressure on the Court itself. In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing sanctions on ICC officials and designating the Court's Prosecutor, citing the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Later rounds that year added judges and both deputy prosecutors, some over the Palestine case and others over the Court's investigation of US personnel in Afghanistan. The warrants carry legal weight and produce political consequences. But the Court has no police of its own. States parties are legally bound to arrest and surrender suspects on their territory, yet execution rests with national authorities, and Russia and Israel, which are not parties, have no intention of complying.The United States as a test case
The United States has not ratified Additional Protocol I. The Reagan administration formally declined in 1987: transmitting Additional Protocol II to the Senate, President Reagan called Protocol I “fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed” and refused to submit it at all. Two specific objections stood out, both aimed at provisions that would have constrained operational choices. Article 1(4) would extend combatant protections to fighters in wars of national liberation against colonial domination or foreign occupation, which the administration read as extending legal status to the PLO and similar organizations. Article 44(3) relaxes the distinction requirement, letting fighters in certain circumstances keep combatant status while carrying arms openly only during each military engagement and while visible to the adversary during the deployment preceding an attack. It was one of the provisions behind the Joint Chiefs’ conclusion that “a number of the provisions” of the Protocol were “militarily unacceptable.”
Staying out of AP I did not free the United States from the Conventions themselves, but it did put the Protocol’s reach in dispute. Proportionality and distinction are now recognized as customary international law binding even on non-parties: the ICRC’s study of customary IHL draws its rules from the practice of both treaty and non-treaty states. The US accepts those two principles; what it formally contested was the study’s method and many of its specific rules, arguing that the ICRC mischaracterized treaty-specific rules from AP I as customary law binding on states that never ratified the Protocol. The US and the ICRC remain in formal disagreement about how much law binds states that signed the core Conventions but not the Protocols. So the route by which the Protocol’s rules reach non-parties is disputed, in its details, by the state best placed to block formal enforcement.
Abu Ghraib documented what domestic accountability looks like in practice. In 2003 and 2004, US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq systematically subjected detainees to torture, sexual humiliation, and degrading treatment. Manadel al-Jamadi died in US custody at the facility — beaten during interrogation, his body documented in the now-familiar photographs. Eleven US soldiers were convicted of related offenses. Lynndie England served about eighteen months of a three-year sentence before parole. Charles Graner, identified as a ringleader, served six and a half years of a ten-year sentence.
The photographs made denial impossible; what stayed open was how far up the chain accountability would travel. Prison sentences stopped at the enlisted level. The only officer court-martialed, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, was acquitted of the abuse-related charges. Donald Rumsfeld, who authorized expanded interrogation techniques that created the conditions in which Abu Ghraib occurred, faced no criminal proceedings. Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyers who authored the Office of Legal Counsel memoranda redefining torture to cover only pain equivalent in intensity to that accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or death, were never charged, although the OLC itself later repudiated those legal arguments. The civilian contractors who worked as interrogators at the prison never faced a criminal trial; the only legal reckoning for their employer, CACI, came through a civil lawsuit brought by Iraqi survivors. Two decades on, Human Rights Watch could find no evidence that the US government had paid compensation or other redress to Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons.
The state that committed the violations controlled who was charged, what evidence was gathered, and how far up the chain any investigation traveled. What kept sentences at the enlisted level was the framework’s reliance on the violator’s own courts. In law, any state party may try a grave breach; in practice, no other state had custody of the officials concerned, and no international court had jurisdiction over them.
In Yemen the roles changed hands and the structure held. Saudi coalition forces struck hospitals whose GPS coordinates had been shared with coalition commanders. The United States provided military support to the coalition, including intelligence and logistics. Neither Yemen nor Saudi Arabia is a party to the Rome Statute, and the Security Council never referred the situation to the ICC. The coalition investigated itself through a Joint Incidents Assessment Team, which concluded that the October 2015 bombing of the MSF-supported Haydan hospital caused “no human damage”; Human Rights Watch found that these reviews failed to hold anyone to account. The same gap opens wherever no outside court can reach, whether or not US forces are the direct perpetrators.
What the system achieves
Where prosecution is absent, documentation still does some work: states modify behavior when violations are documented, attributed, and publicized. What moves them is reputational cost; the powerful have little prosecution to fear. The ICRC’s bilateral and confidential approach produces results in individual cases: POW access negotiated, detention conditions improved, specific prisoners located. MSF’s public documentation of hospital strikes in Yemen generated political pressure that domestic accountability mechanisms could not. The mechanism fails when states decide the benefit of the violation exceeds the reputational cost, and that happens regularly.
The substantive law has also spread beyond its treaty form. Nicaragua confirmed Common Article 3 as customary law. AP I’s core principles of proportionality, distinction and precaution are now recognized as customary despite the US non-ratification. States that never ratified AP I are still legally bound by its core prohibitions, in the view of most international law scholars and the ICRC. The law has spread even as enforcement has stayed weak, and the US has taken the customary study seriously enough to contest it formally.
Then there are the tribunals: Nuremberg, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, its counterpart for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Germany’s conviction of Anwar Raslan. The later tribunals drew directly on the Geneva Conventions. The Yugoslavia tribunal’s statute made grave breaches a crime in its own right, and the Rwanda tribunal prosecuted violations of Common Article 3. Nuremberg, which predated the 1949 Conventions, helped inspire them. None operated through the Conventions’ own enforcement mechanisms. Each needed something the Conventions do not supply: victors or a Security Council willing to build a court after the fighting, or a national prosecutor willing to act. The Conventions hold the rules ready for whenever politics allows a trial. That moment typically comes when a powerful actor has already lost, or when a sufficiently determined third-country court acts against a defendant who can be reached.
The ICTY prosecuted Bosnian Serb and Croatian officials because the political constellation in the early 1990s made ad hoc tribunal creation possible; the US, Russia, and European powers all had reasons to support it. The ICTR prosecuted Rwandan genocide perpetrators because the new Rwandan government had asked for an international tribunal (even though it ended up voting against the final design) and because the international community was visibly ashamed of its inaction. Germany prosecuted Raslan because he was physically on German territory, and the German judiciary was willing. These trials delivered accountability, and they also show what it took: a specific political alignment that will not be repeated on demand.
Raslan is serving a life sentence in Germany for what he did in Damascus. The ICTY convicted Radovan Karadzic, and Nuremberg executed Nazi leadership. The laws of war made these outcomes possible, at Nuremberg before the Conventions existed and through the Conventions afterwards. Enforcement, in the usual sense, means a reliable and predictable consequence of violation. These outcomes depended on conditions that, for the architects and the powerful, very rarely align.
What the signatures bought
In a narrow sense, the anniversary celebration was accurate: 196 states have ratified the same four documents, a reach matched by only a handful of treaties in existence and an achievement of international legal history.
But states could ratify so widely because the enforcement architecture preserved their sovereignty. They got the standing of formal commitment, including the right to cite the Conventions against their adversaries, without surrendering practical control over whether their own conduct would ever be adjudicated. Every mechanism designed to create external accountability was either almost never used or structured to require the consent of the violator: a Protecting Power means accepting a neutral monitor with actual access, and the IHFFC means consenting to scrutiny; the ICRC mostly operates in silence because the alternative risks exclusion; the ICC rarely reaches the most powerful states because they stayed outside it and hold a veto over the Council route into it. Washington asked Rome for a nationality-consent shield, and when Rome refused it, Washington stayed out.
That is how the same organization could, six weeks apart, celebrate a treaty with 196 parties and report, as it has since 2003, that the lack of respect for it is the law’s single most important challenge.
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Media
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