REQUE 2 · The 4th Geneva Convention’s Drafting History as the origin of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Duty to Prevent (D2P).
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-09-01 → 2018-08-31
- EU contribution
- €180,277
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
The 4th Geneva Convention’s Drafting History as the origin of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Duty to Prevent (D2P).
Project Summary – REQUE 2 Context: The overall objective of Marie Curie Fellowship -REQUE 2 was to historically reconstruct the drafting history of the 4th Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilians in War (‘GC-IV’), whose drafting began in 1946, and was signed on August 12th, 1949. GC-IV is the most important international legal treaty concerning the laws of war and armed conflict. It is the only treaty in the history of modern international law to have been signed and ratified by nearly all the recognized countries of the world. One would be hard pressed to imagine today’s world without GC-IV, whose fundamentality, pervasiveness, and all-encompassing nature have radically altered the role and functions of the international community. Project Objective: To articulate the history of GC-IV’s drafting through an intertwining with the biographies of this treaty’s key drafters. along the 3-year process in which they drafted it (1946-1949).
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The objective of this project is to uncover the source materials of current humanitarian norms (Responsibility to Protect and Duty to Prevent) within the first and most important tool of International Humanitarian Law – the 4th Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilians (1949). Specifically, this project aims to generate a comprehensive historical and legal account of the drafting process and of the 4th Geneva Convention, as to date, no such comprehensive account exists. The research agenda envisages an innovative Multi factor framework approach, examining alongside the Red Cross archives in Geneva, the important National Archives of the US, France, the UK and Switzerland (the Conventions’ Custodian), who all advocated and pushed for the Convention’s endorsement after WWII. The recent opening of national archives, following the lifting of the 50 year disclosure ban provides unprecedented access to hitherto unpublished materials, which could shed much-needed light upon our comprehension of the Convention’s terms and legal interpretation, based upon the original intentions of the drafters. With the interpretation of this convention deeply contested in both judicial and policy circles, uncovering the original drafting sources of the 4th Geneva Convention’s, could shed much needed light on questions regarding the nature of military occupation, of judicial oversight over armed conflict, and of the attitudes to be attributed to irregular fighting forces and non state actors. Recent events, most notably in the Middle East and North Africa point to an alarming tendency of the erosion of any limits to armed conduct. This process goes hand in hand with the exponential surge in civilian casualties in these armed conflicts. Uncovering the original sources which motivated drafters to limit war – while accepting its existence as a feature of human nature is all the more timely and relevant today.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI VERONA · VeronaCoordinatorItaly
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union