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Opinion
Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
What is international humanitarian law? Families flee their destroyed homes in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City. While humanitarian workers providing services to conflict-affected civilian populations rely on a set of laws to protect them, some conflict parties violate these global agreements, from attacking hospitals and schools to preventing humanitarian workers from reaching civilians with life-saving goods and services. Source: UN News
– International humanitarian law is at breaking point, as rampant impunity for serious violations is enabling even greater abuses against civilians and detainees.
In all current wars, violations are no longer hidden or exceptional. They are increasingly open, systematic and unpunished, with catastrophic consequences for those whom the law is supposed to protect.
A new analysis of 23 armed conflict situations between July 2024 and the end of 2025 reveals a consistent pattern: civilians are being killed, abused and starved on a large scale, while accountability mechanisms fail or are actively undermined. Genocidal violence in Gaza, a new risk of genocide in Sudan, and mass atrocities elsewhere are not isolated horrors. Taken together, they point to a deeper failure: the collapse of meaningful restraint in the conduct of hostilities.
Conflict-related sexual violence has reached epidemic levels. Rape, sexual slavery, and sexual violence used as punishment or as a tool of territorial control have been documented in multiple conflicts, including in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Sudan. Particularly alarming is the growing number of cases of attacks on children, including victims as young as one year old.
These are not byproducts of war, but violations long prohibited by international humanitarian law, now committed with almost total impunity. This occurs with the complicity of many other States, which have the duty to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law.
This erosion of civil protection is not primarily the result of gaps in legal knowledge. The rules exist. The problem is political choice and the persistent failure to apply, clarify and update the law when it no longer offers a meaningful restriction.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the global arms trade. The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty has been widely ratified, including by major exporters such as China, France and the United Kingdom. In theory, it requires its member states to deny arms transfers where there is a clear risk that the weapons will be used to commit serious violations of international law. In practice, legal risk assessments are too often overridden by strategic and political considerations.
Continued arms exports to Israel, Russia and other countries, despite overwhelming evidence of harm to civilians, have had devastating consequences on the ground.
Closing this gap does not require a host of new rules anytime soon. Requires consistent application of existing: evidence-based, enforceable export controls; independent scrutiny of licensing decisions; and real accountability when transfers are authorized despite a clear risk that the recipient will violate the law.
Although certain categories of weapons are incompatible with the protection of civilians, they do not necessarily violate already permissive norms. Repeated firing on populated areas with gravity artillery from the air and long-range inaccurate artillery from the ground has been a major cause of civilian casualties in multiple conflicts.
There is a fundamental lack of clarity about two key rules: first, how close an attack can be launched to a military target while still complying with the law; and second, how much incidental civilian damage is allowed when attacking a military objective.
On both issues, the law requires urgent clarification. Restricting air-delivered weapons to precision-guided munitions would already make a measurable difference to civilian survival. However, to achieve this it is necessary for States to clarify and update the rules of international humanitarian law drafted in the 1970s.
In conflicts between states, such as in Ukraine’s Kherson province, Russian (and other) forces have used drones to attack civilians, sometimes with real-time video footage posted online by the perpetrators.
At the same time, armed drones are no longer the exclusive domain of States. Its use by non-state armed groups is increasing rapidly, including the JNIM in the Sahel, the Islamic State in Somalia and the Arakan Army in Myanmar. There is an urgent need for stronger mechanisms to attribute, investigate and prosecute illegal attacks using drones and autonomous weapons.
Impunity on this scale is not inevitable. It is the product of sustained political and financial negligence. Institutions designed to promote compliance with international humanitarian law – including national courts and international tribunals – are under severe pressure, with some facing paralysis or closure due to lack of resources.
Even judges from bodies such as the International Criminal Court have been sanctioned simply for carrying out their mandates. If States are serious about protecting civilians, political and financial support for these institutions must be considered a fundamental obligation and a political priority, not an optional gesture.
The current moment represents a critical test for international humanitarian law itself. International lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht once warned that the law existed at the “vanishing point” of international law. That warning is no longer theoretical.
Whether humanitarian law continues to function as a real limitation on war or becomes symbolic rhetoric will depend on the political decisions that states make now and whether the protection of civilians is treated as a legal rather than a discretionary duty.
Stuart Casey Maslen is an international lawyer and lead author of War Watch: International Humanitarian Law in Focus at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.
IPS UN Office
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