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IHL: Soviet-Afghan War, Saddam Hussein, Ad Hoc Tribunals, and Guantánamo

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War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice

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Abstract

The 1974–1977 Diplomatic Conference’s success in getting an extremely diverse group of nations to approve the two Protocols Additional was remarkable. But their completion was just that—adherence and enforcement would prove to be much more difficult. Within a few years after the Diplomatic Conference ended, major wars broke out in Afghanistan and the Middle East that would seriously test the efficacy of these accords. This all took place in the midst of what was probably the greatest political upheaval in the second half of the twentieth century—the collapse of the Soviet satellite system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. Though this was, for the most part, peaceful, it did breed wars of conflict, particularly in the Former Yugoslavia and parts of Russia, that would see considerable violations of IHL. But if there was a silver lining in any of this, it was that once the Cold War theoretically ended, so did those ideological barriers that had long prevented the international community from creating international judicial mechanisms to deal with grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, acts of genocide, and war crimes. Between 1993 and 2002, the international community created three major tribunals—two ad hoc and one permanent—to address some of the major crimes committed in various conflicts in Europe, Africa, and Asia since the adoption of Protocols Additional.

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Notes

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Crowe, D.M. (2014). IHL: Soviet-Afghan War, Saddam Hussein, Ad Hoc Tribunals, and Guantánamo. In: War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137037015_10

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