leans and Methods of Warfare: PROHIBITED WI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTIONBRIEF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION 490 BC: As recorded by Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, Athenians armed with swords and spears killed 6,400 Persians during one day of fighting. Also, during endless wars between city-states, Greeks used sulfur mixed with pitch resin to produce suffocating fumes as a weapon and polluted their enemies’ drinking water supplies with animal corpses. These are the earliest known examples of chemical and biological warfare. 1750s: During the French and Indian Wars the British used smallpox-intected blankets to promote the spread of the disease among their Indian enemies. 1860s: In the American Civil War the main weapons were muzzle-loading rifles and cannons. The official number of Union soldiers killed in action during the four-year war was 93,443. An estimated 80,000 to 90,000 Confederates were killed in action.1910s (WW1): At Langemark, France, the Germans had released chlorine gas, the first chemical attack of the war. It killed 5,000 French soldiers. Later, mustard gas used by both sides killed 91,000 and injured 1.2 million people. 1930s & 1940s (WWII): The Japanese killed at least 270,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians by infecting them with bubonic plague, anthrax, smallpox, typhoid, syphilis, and cholera. This was the first widespread use of biological warfare. Germans killed two million people, mostly Jews, at Auschwitz, Poland. Most died after being packed in gas chambers and then sprayed with the pesticide Zyklon-B. This was the first use of a chemical to perform mass murder on civilians. Go August 6 and 9, 1945, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, US planes cropped atomic bombs that killed more than 200,000 pespe: most of them civilian. Tens of thousands of others died later from a host of blast and radiation injuries. These were the first two and only uses of nuclear warfare to date.* 1990s: During three months of 1994 in the African nation of Rwanda, the majority ethnic group, the Hutus, used mostly firearms, machetes, and garden toals to murder 800,000 people belonging to the minority group, the Tutsis. * The following year in Srebrenica, Bosnia (in central Europe) Bosnian Serb soldiers shot more than 7,000 Bosnian men and boys and buried them alive with bulldozers. © 2001: On Seplember 11, 2001, 19 men armed with box cutters seized four US passenger planes flying their normal domestic flights and took over the controls. They drave two of the planes into each of New York City's twin towers: and one inte the Pentagon in Virginia. The fourth crashed in Pennsytvania. More than 3,000 people died.WHAT IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION? + History makes very clear, almost any weapon or tool in the hands of human beings--a sword, an incendiary bomb, a hoe, a bulldozer--is capable of inflicting massive and terrible injuries and death. Today, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) is a collective term used to describe four classes of weapons systems: nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological. The term NBC — nuclear, biological and chemical is often used in |Yace of WMD but does not include radiological weapons.ARE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION PROHIBITED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW? Unlike a sword or a gun, nudes, biological, chemical, and radiological weapons are gen te is because they are indiscriminate weapons that cause Saceive and long-term consequences. These weapons are singled out for special attention because of the horrors associated with thelr capacity to annihilate in a single stroke thousands, even millions of human beingsTHE LEGAL FRAMEWORK BEHIND THE PROHIBITION OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Weapons of mass destruction are prohibited under the principles and norms of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. Issues of humanitarian law do converge with issues of human rights since there is a minimum standard of ethics common to both fields. The notable difference is thal the main United Nations Covenants and regional human rights instruments have no “threshold” and apply to all situations irrespective of whether there is armed conflict or not.All the major treaties governing humanitarian law, including the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the two Additional Protocols of 1977, themselves incorporate customary Intemational law in a number of ways.THE HAGUE CONVENTIONS OF 1899 AND 1907 Mindset of the Conventions Referance to customary international law is found in the 1899 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV) and the 1907 Hague Convention. Paragraph 3 of the preamble defines one of the objects of the Convention as. “to revise the general laws and custome of war, either with a view to defining them with greater precision or to confining them within such limits as would mitigate their severity as far as possible". It was fell necessary in the preamble to stale thal it has not been possible in the Convention to cover all the circumstances which can arise in practice.+ Proportionality ie cf inetaet tt eso prociekrne Te Ca . entitled “Hastilities”, th is an imy 22 that proclaims: 1e right of Betigeents to adopt ea the enemy is not unlimited.” Article 22 in fact underlines a so that the use of wea| must not be out of enon the pursuit of legitimate military action. » Weapons causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous Injury Article 23 states that, in addition to the ibitions Powe conventions, it is especially forbidden Apetlal es hings: ooo "to “to a raat woo unecessary ang? it should be nated that the earlier Convention (1899) instead the formula “or material of a nature to cause superfluous injury” so that the two terms “calculated to cause unnecessary ring” and “of a nature to cause anne injury” could be employed, mutatis mulandis, as covering theCivilians to be spared and weapons not to be of indiscriminate effect + The common article 3 of the Conventions establishes the principle that a distinction must be made between civilians and persons who have laid down must be treated humanely and cannot be subjected to . there beat hls ainst combatants and mi targets should not Benson be ct be of strineta effect so as to afoot ehitand ot or combatants # individuals they enjoy fundamental rights that must be respected een cmrtiad sone inflict. a " « This article has been determined by the ICJ to as a “common yarisick’ in any armed conflict, whether or not a State is an active Participant in an armed contliTHE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS The Gener! Assembly of the United Nations has on numerous occasions condemned the use of nuclear weapons as illegal, a violation of the Charter and a crime against humanity. A few States, obviously NW States, maintain the contrary - on the theory that ilo Nive are not specifically prohibited by any international treaty they are not illegal. On 15 December 1994 the General Assembly decided to seek an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. In its reference to the ICJ the General Assembly expressed its conviction that the complete elimination of nuclear weapons was the only guarantee against the threat of nuclear war.THE ADVISORY OPINION OF THE ICJ ON THE USE AND THREAT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: In its Advisory Opinion the ICJ noted that NW States had generally accepted that their “independence to act” was curtailed by the principles and rules of international law, more particularly humanitarian law. There is further no doubt that humanitarian law applies not only to conventional weapons but also to NWs although NWs were invented after most of the principles and rules of humanitarian law applicable in armed conflict had been elaborated. The Court cited with approval a passage in the written statement submitted by the Government of New Zealand: “In general, international humanitarian law bears on the threat or use of luclear weapons as it does on other weapons. International humanitarian law has evolved to meet contemporary circumstances, and is not limited in its application to weaponry of an earlier time. The fundamental principles of this law end&re: to mitigate and circumscribe the cruelty of war for humanitarian reasons.”+ The Court observed that the right to life guaranteed by article 6 of the ICCPR did not cease in times of war, that the use of NWs against a group as such may infringe article III of the Genocide Convention where the element of intent was manifest. The Court also recognized that the use of NWs could be catastrophic for the environment, which “represents the living space, the qu gay of life and the very health of human beings, including generations unl Nickie atone edi eel plinth Lar. fodiens ame bac aage ight ie pair Balled Is would necessarily be at variance with the principles and rules of law applicable in armed conflict in ‘any circumstance”. * The ICJ went on to observe: Fiddle ce hele one ching a pA a whole ... and of the elements of atts daposa, the Cou eed to observe hat i cannot Teed c cotrhive Gamma on We eer be (egality of the use of nuclear weapons by a State in an extreme circumstance of self-defence in which its very survival would be at stake.”+ The Martens Clause Of particular importance, the High Contracting Parties have proclaimed in the preamble they do not intend that unforeseen cases should, in the absence of a written undertaking, be left to the arbitrary judgment of military commanders. Instead, they have deemed it expedient to declare that “in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized persons, from the laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience”. The above clause, which is commonly known as the Martens Clause, therefore represents a link between treaty law and customary international law dealing with the law of armed conflict and it recognizes “customary international law” as the ultimate yardstick when measuring legitimacy of the means and measures used in armed conflicts.