Common Article 3, 1949 Geneva Conventions, 12 August (War Victims)

Note by author

The four interlocking Geneva Conventions of 1949 dealt mostly with international armed conflict, being largely a reaction to the Second World War. An identical article no. 3 in each, hence Common Article 3, dealt with non-international armed conflict, being largely a reaction to the Spanish civil war of 1936–1939. In several subsequent armed conflicts, the war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s being a leading example, different governments saw the conflict through different legal prisms. Some saw the fighting as international, while others saw it as an essentially internal conflict, but with outside participation. There was thus controversy over which set of rules applied, the law of international armed conflict or only Common Article 3. There were other examples of what some commentators referred to as “internationalized civil wars.” The US Supreme Court in 2006 ruled in the Hamdan case that Common Article 3 applied in all armed conflicts, as the minimum humanitarian standard. It is widely believed that Common Article 3 is declarative of customary international law. It has been supplemented by Additional Protocol II (APII), added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, also for internal war, but with a different field of application from Common Article 3.