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Today is the 70th birthday of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. They are the most important rules ever formulated for armed conflict and universally ratified. THREAD. #GC70 
Many of today’s celebrations will perpetuate old myths about the Conventions, however. In this thread, I want to debunk a few of them by discussing the drafters' intentions, their unique achievements, as well as their shortcomings - that we're still grappling with today.
One of the oldest myths about the Conventions is that the drafters were living in a so-called ivory tower. Who is so naive, critics asked, to draft a set of rules for something so lawless as war? Contrary to this image, however, many drafters had seen war with their own eyes.
They had fought during the war as soldiers, or as partisans behind enemy lines; other had seen the liberation of Dachau, been held as POW in Nazi Germany, or had lost family members during the Holocaust.
One example is Elisabeta Luca, a Spanish Civil War veteran, survivor of the Holocaust, and representing Rumania at the diplomatic conference. In 1949, she acted as a communist propagandist fiercely criticizing the Anglo-American powers' unwillingness to outlaw atomic bombing.
Another example is Georges Cahen-Salvador, a remarkable French-Jewish drafter who had escaped from the Holocaust. He’s responsible for drafting the original text of Common Article 3, one of the most revolutionary elements of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
There is a also widespread belief that the drafting of the Geneva Conventions was historically quick, taking just five months (April-August 1949). (On the picture you can see Cahen signing the final text.) Nothing could be further from the truth, however.
The diplomatic conference was hopelessly delayed: it was expected to last only 5 weeks, not 5 months. The official start of the post-war drafting process had, in fact, been in early 1945, and it took more than four years to finish.
It could even be argued that the drafting took not 5 months, nor 4 years, but 3 decades in total. The first serious plans for a comprehensive treaty had been coined in 1921 (see pic), but the ICRC was unable to gather enough state support for it until after WWII.
This raises another problem - of contingency. Throughout this long process drafters conceptualized many different versions of the Conventions: whereas US-UK drafters initially wished to have no Civ Convention at all, the ICRC experimented with several options (see pic).
This point demonstrates why we need to draw a map of different drafting routes that are often missing or forgotten during today’s celebrations, which tend to take the final outcome, of four unique treaties for many victims of war, for granted.
You’ll also hear many say today that the Conventions are a product of Henry Dunant’s (see pic) pioneering work at Solferino, or the ICRC’s liberal-humanitarian agenda. This is certainly not wrong, but it fails to do justice to other drafters, especially the Soviets.
The Soviets were critical in creating groundbreaking support for plans to end 'inhumane' measures in war. The idea that the Conventions are an exclusive product of liberal thinking belongs in the dustbin of history, as I argue in this piece. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Still, it would be wrong to suggest that human rights thinking had no impact whatsoever, as many scholars believe nowadays - see my contrary take on this issue. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Pilloud argued that there existed ‘des points communs évidents’ between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Conventions. Jean Pictet even suggested that the declaration had remained largely theoretical, whereas 'Geneva Law [was leading] the way.'
Key drafters saw measures like hostage taking as a violation of the rights and dignity of victims of war - a decisive conceptual shift. The most important consequence of this alteration was that it led to continuing calls for less tolerance for brutality in (civil) wars.
This shift was part of a much larger alteration in focus from POW rights to civilians in war. It was made possible by the formerly Axis-occupied nations demanding an end to brutal occupation. In some ways, it represented victims’ justice - unlike Nuremberg’s ‘victors’ justice’.
Still, the idea that the Conventions are a product of WWII and backward-looking is an after-the-fact story that drafters like(d) to tell, to stress their common struggle against Axis rule while glossing over their major divisions during the post-war drafting process.
Indeed, the drafters, including the ICRC, had very different interests, legal visions, and thought much more about the present and future than is commonly accepted - see my forthcoming book.
To give one example, it is often said that drafters had not anticipated that civil and colonial wars would multiply in the decades after 1949, thereby explaining the Conventions’ limited set of rules for such armed conflicts. icrc.org/en/document/5-…
This is another unfortunate myth of the image that the law is backward-looking. In reality, imperial powers expressed major concern about plans to regulate colonial wars BECAUSE they feared more were to come in the future - and thus tried to undermine Common Article 3.
This provision is one of the drafters’ key achievements: it plays a key role in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and provides the ICRC with access to victims of civil war, from Syria to Yemen (also in the 1960, see pic).
CA3 grew out of the original preamble for the Civ Convention (see pic), the project to which drafters devoted most of their attention. In their eyes, the war's atrocities and the revolutionary changes indicated by the fall of empire required the law's structural reimagination.
Their achievements are numerous - they banned hostage taking, collective penalties, torture, gave more rights to POWs, strengthened the ICRC’s position, and developed a set of unique penal provisions that are now at the heart of the International Criminal Court’s legal guidebook.
But drafters failed on many counts, too. They failed in trying to persuade UK-US hegemony to accept restrictions on air bombing, nuclear weapons, and starvation - which would undermine the ICRC's later operation in Biafra. They also perpetuated several gender hierarchies.
Finally, because of Geneva’s shortcomings, the ICRC immediately started with revising them, culminating into the Additional Protocols of 1977 - the last major legal offensive to revise the laws of war.
On this day of well-deserved celebrations, I also want to draw the attention to one of the martyrs of the 1949 Geneva Conventions: Abdulhafid Yusuf Ibrahim. He’s the world’s first IHL activist in history killed while disseminating the Conventions. RIP.
