This paper depicts significant events, as well as important doctrines, which affected the traditional comprehension of the terms “international armed conflict” and “non-international armed conflict”, thus showing the process of adapting this distinction from the realm of facts to the realm of law. Although the division between international and non-international armed conflicts is quite old, it was not until the mid-20th century when it was first incorporated in international law. Before the Article 3 common to four Geneva Conventions was established, international law had been dealing only with rights and duties of parts to the international conflicts, regarding non-international conflicts as internal affairs of particular states. Because for many years it had been pointless to seek for norms of international law which generally and abstractly would determine humanitarian standards in case of an outbreak of internal conflict, regulations incorporated in Geneva Conventions of 1949 were first regarded as huge success. Nevertheless, currently they are commonly considered to be too vague and not precise enough. Moreover, they seem to be inadequate to modern armed conflicts – so called “transnational conflicts” or “new wars”, which do not fit in legal frames of “international armed conflict” or “non-international armed conflict”, created over 60 years ago.
Today, we witness a growing Poland's activity in delegating its soldiers to serve in frames of international peace-keeping operations. The legal source for such decisions is rooted both in the Poland's national law and its international legal commitments, especially within the Law of Armed Conflicts. Also the local laws are binding for soldiers on the mission. All these provisions define the legal status of soldiers, their rights and obligations under law, as well as the scope of responsibility in case of conduct which would disobey the binding rules. All these questions within the specific context of peace-keeping organizations are elaborated in the paper at hand.
So far a few attempts have been undertaken in order to grant the Guantanamo detainees certain constitutional protection and rights resulting from the international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Those court cases pertain on the one hand to the foreigners detained at Guantanamo Bay and on the other to the American citizens considered 'enemy combatants' and detained in the territory of the United States. Diverse judgments of the American courts and arbitral standards of treatment and qualification of the detainees by the American administration are the evidence of the hypocrisy of the authorities and of a lack of respect for the law and its arbitral interpretation according to particular needs. New terms are being invented and only after that definitions are added to them (for instance 'enemy combatant'), terms which one will in vain look for in the international humanitarian law regulations. We deal here with the creation of new unnecessary and confusing terms because those terms which can be found in the Geneva Conventions namely those of combatants, prisoners of war and civilian person are sufficient and precise. On June 28, 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court (SC) passed judgments in three important cases: Rumsfeld vs. Padilla, Rasul vs. Bush and Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld. In Rasul vs. Bush the SC held that the U.S courts have jurisdiction to verify the legality of Executive's potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing. Unfortunately it does not mean that the detainees are finally guaranteed some substantial rights but only a procedural right to challenge the legality of their detention. The American courts have a very responsible task to perform but they should not hesitate to question and control executive's decisions which may violate basic human rights.
In the most violent times, during a war prisoners were killed, kept or sold as slaves. While the concept of prisoner of war and their rights emerged in the seventeenth century, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that these rights began to be specified and an international definition attempted. The Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949 finally set the standards for the definition and treatment of prisoners of war. This article presents how, despite all international regulations, doubts over the status of prisoners of war still arise every time the world deals with an international conflict and how issues relating to the determination of the status should be resolved according to the Geneva Conventions.
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.