The Year in Review

Nineteen ninety-nine was a year of taking stock. For humanitarian lawyers, this was facilitated by the fact that it was a year of anniversaries. As well as being the final year of the decade of international law, it was also the centenary of the first Hague peace conference and the first Hague Convention and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, providing ample occasion for reflection on the successes and failures of this branch of international law over the past century. The tone of the various commemorative meetings was chastened rather than celebratory. As one commentator noted: ‘At the end of a century which has seen so much of war and in which the laws of war have proven so comparatively ineffectual, it seems obvious that that law must be seen as deficient and the record of the last hundred years be adjudged one of failure rather than achievement. (…) Yet the principle conclusion is not that the world needs new law, or different law, but that the law which we have needs to be made more effective.’The major developments in international humanitarian law have closely tracked a century that has seen society and the nature and aims of warfare change dramatically. Developments in the law have been reactive rather than anticipatory and have built on a model that was designed in response to imperatives that were different than those faced today and those that will be faced in the future. The time has long since passed in many countries when the state has a monopoly on violence. Entire societies have been militarised, and in many areas war has been ‘privatised’ as ‘mercenaries, rebels, mutinous gangsters emerge to exploit the decline of the state’.