definition of international armed conflict

Finally, there is also a real peril that various (judicial) bodies will interpret the term protracted armed violence in the literal sense (as the duration of violence, which is a separate criterion for the existence of NIAC).Ĭustomary criteria for the existence of NIAC and the practice of the ICTY Even if Article 8(2)(f) of ICC Statute did introduce a new type of NIAC (with the scope of its application placed between the scope of application of Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions (CA 3) and the Additional Protocol II of 1977 (AP II)), this fact should be limited only to the application of ICC Statute and should bear no validity from the perspective of IHL. The main arguments of this blog and the paper are the following: there are strong reasons to advocate that the term protracted armed violence in the NIAC definition should be understood as part of the criterion of the intensity of violence and not as a separate criterion of its duration. The authors of this blog would like to express their gratitude for the opportunity to share their thoughts on this issue, which have been presented in greater detail in their recent article. 70) and the issue of its true meaning remains controversial, both in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Criminal Law (ICL). This dilemma stems from the widely accepted definition of armed conflict ( ICTY, Tadi? case, Jurisdiction, para. The issue thus revolves around the question of whether the duration of a conflict should be regarded as an independent criterion for the existence of NIAC or as a part of the intensity criterion.

If one presumes that at the end of June 1991 Slovenia was not a sovereign state (thus excluding the IAC possibility), what remains is whether the conflict that lasted only 10 days could be viewed as a NIAC to begin with. There is a controversy as to whether this armed conflict was in fact international (IAC) or non-international in nature. Its dissolution started with the so-called Ten-Day War, which was fought from 27 June to 7 July 1991 between the Slovenian Territorial Defence and the Yugoslav People’s Army, resulting in some 60 fatalities and 330 wounded. Both authors of this blog were born in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists.

Definition of international armed conflict