What is the Geneva Convention? And what are war crimes?

Geneva Convention is the name given to several international treaties signed between 1864 and 1949 to reduce the effects of wars on the civilian population, in addition to offering protection to captured or wounded soldiers. The history of these treaties is associated with the Swiss Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross. Dunant took the initiative to organize this type of agreement at a convention in the city of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1864, which was attended by the main European powers. After the first meeting, several other conventions were held to expand and detail a kind of regulation for participation in a war. The city of The Hague, in the Netherlands, hosted two of the following meetings (in 1899 and 1907) and in Switzerland itself, three other conventions were signed (in 1906, 1929 and 1949).

“The application of these laws remains unsatisfactory, although the first article common to all Geneva Conventions establishes that it is the duty of nations to comply with treaties”, says British journalist Kim Gordon-Bates, spokesman for the Red Cross. Even so, the treaties at least served to clarify what the world considers unacceptable in armed conflict. Anyone who goes beyond these limits commits so-called war crimes. After World War II (1939-1945), for example, the famous Nuremberg Tribunal was set up, in the German city of the same name, where Nazi leaders were tried, accused, among other things, of violating international law. A similar court was organized in Tokyo to try the Japanese, allies of the Germans in the conflict.

“These courts confirmed that individuals could be held responsible for violating international law, establishing that superior orders do not exempt a defendant from responsibility,” says jurist Peter John Rowe of the University of Lancaster in England. In 1998, a treaty signed in Rome, Italy, created the International Criminal Court, with the task of judging serious violations considered war crimes. Today, former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic faces this court, accused of acts committed in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.