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International humanitarian law strictly prohibits the use of human shields and,
through a well-known genealogy of supranational efforts that passes through the Hague
Convention IV (1907), the Geneva Conventions III and IV (1949), the Additional
Protocol I (1977), and, more recently, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court (1998), has sought to prevent this practice. However, both states and nonstate
belligerents have deployed human shields in order to gain military advantages—to ward
off attacks by placing civilians close to military targets or hiding military targets
within areas inhabited by civilians. This is especially the case in asymmetric
conflict, where the weaker party can use human shields to protect fighters, weapons,
strategic sites, and critical infrastructures, and to delay, deter, and even
discourage attackers from direct engagement that might lead to a high number of
civilian casualties. On the other hand, the attacking party can allege that the
“other” party is using civilians as human shields. Even in the absence of actual
evidence, such an allegation has come to constitute a convenient excuse for attackers
to justify civilian casualties and to relegate the responsibility for their deaths to
the party that endangered them in the first place. In asymmetric conflict, therefore,
parties are incentivized to resort to a politics of human shielding.
Human shielding occurs through the use of the body—an individual or collective
physical presence—which is not armed and does not rely on the use of force or fire.
Understood as both a means (human shields) and a method (human shielding), shielding is the use of “civilians or other protected persons, whose presence or
movement is aimed or used to render military targets immune from military
operations.” Human shielding raises difficult doctrinal questions as to the
interpretation and implementation of international humanitarian law that are not
easily answered. This is in part because human shielding reanimates a series of
queries that, as I argue elsewhere, are constitutive of international
humanitarian law itself, namely: What and who is a combatant? What and who is a
civilian? Who is to judge and according to which premises? Human shielding reanimates
these questions because it is upon the definition of a civilian, in contradistinction
to the combatant, that the power and efficacy of shielding depends. As I have shown,
the distinction between civilian and combatant is partially constituted through
discourses of gender which naturalize sex and sex difference. These discourses, as
I sketch out below, are cited when theorizing the significance of human shields and
reappear when evaluating the representation and meaning of the embodied movement of
human shields.
One of the most vexing conundrums of 21st century warfare has been not
just the explosive growth in the use of human shields, but the apparent systemization
of the tactic, particularly by nonstate actors. In noting the international
prohibition, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) defines the practice as the “intentional co-location of
military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the
specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.”
The phenomenon of human shields challenges core tenets of international humanitarian
law (IHL), including its careful dialectic between the imperatives of humanity and
military necessity. Although the principles of distinction, precaution, and
proportionality are well established in the abstract, consensus remains elusive when
these concepts are applied to situations involving human shields, who blur the
boundary between civilians and combatants. And while the prohibition against using human shields is absolute,
it is too often honored in its breach in today's asymmetrical conflicts. Indeed,
resort to human shields has become attractive precisely because it exploits
protective legal rules to the detriment of those principled armed actors who
value—and thus strive for—IHL compliance. These parties, in turn, are struggling to
adapt their operations to a practice that has become “endemic” in the modern battlefield.
The nomenclature of human shields did not exist in 19th century
colonialism, but one can find its proxies in the debates regarding the principles of
distinction and proportionality when defining legitimate targets. Its specters
appeared in the discussions weighing human life and moderating warfare, revealing how
the imperatives of colonial conquest inflected “humanitarian reason” and its epistemic and political investments. The
colonized territory rendered all civilians as potential human shields merely by
existing there. The colonizer/colonized distinction trumped the civilian/combatant
distinction and exposed the radical instability of the principles defining the notion
of human shields; the colonizer seldom thought he had reached the threshold of
disproportionality in violence against the colonized. Instead, the “civilizing
mission” rendered the colonized body perennially vulnerable.
Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul
from the hands of ISIS militants. On October 24, 2016, Pope Francis expressed his
concern over the use of over two hundred boys and men as human shields in
the Iraqi city. In an election rally the following day, Donald Trump decried the
enemy's use of “human shields all over the place,” while the New York
Times reported that the Islamic State is driving hundreds of civilians into Mosul,
using them as human shields. A few days later, the United Nations disseminated a
press release, warning that ISIS militants are using “tens of thousands” as human shields, thus casting
massive numbers of Iraqi civilians as weapons of war.