The international humanitarian law applicable in the new types of armed conflicts

• Author: Nicolae David Ungureanu
• Position: Public Law Department, 'Alexandru Ioan Cuza' Police Academy Bucharest, Romania
• Pages: 184-193

AGORA International Journal of Juridical Sciences, www .juridicaljournal.univagora.ro

ISSN 1843-570X, E-ISSN 2067-7677

No. 4 (2014), pp. 184-195

184

THE INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW APPLICABLE IN THE NEW

TYPES OF ARMED CONFLICTS

N. D. Ungureanu

Nicolae David Ungureanu

Public Law Department

“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Police Academy Bucharest, Romania

*Correspondence: Nicolae David Ungureanu, Police Academy Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Aleea

Privighetorilor 1-3, Bucharest, Romania

E-mail: davidungureanu2008@yahoo.com

Abstract:

The international humanitarian law applicable in armed conflicts has evolved

continuously since antiquity until today, its doctrinal writings pointing out during the modern

period the influence that the progress of the concepts and the practices of war has had on the

development of the normative conventions, especially the first and second world war, resulting

in texts that are applicable even today.



Keywords: international humanitarian law, international relations, peace,

cooperation

Introduction



A careful look at the reality of the international life at the beginning of the 21

st

century

will easily re veal the accelerated dynamic of the changes that have occurred in the process of

using armed force in order to achieve some specific interests of the various international, supra

state, state and intrastate actors, with all the humanitarian consequences, beneficial or

disastrous, that have resulted from these practices.

With the aim of improving the human condition during an armed conflict, the

international humanitarian law drawn up until the end of the 20

th

century seems no longer able

to handle the challenges arising from the transformations occurring in the modalities of using

organized armed violence. The continuation of politics by other means, as Ca rl von

Clausewitz characterized it, the war remains for many a painful necessity even nowadays,

modifying his peculiarities in a chameleonic way, exactly for which it is required, more and

more insistently, the adaptation of the international humanitarian law with the new types of

armed conflicts; increasingly, there are being re ported in the specialty literature the references

to discrepancies betwee n the international traditional law, the classic law of war and the rapid

developments of the modern means and methods of fi ghting at a strategic and tactical level,

more and more unconventional and without explicit legal regulations in the legislative acts in

the field.

On the other hand, there are highlighted the slower normat ive developments of

humanitarian international law after the great encoding achieved in 1977, so that it has not

been able to keep up with the developments of the conflicting practices of international

relations. The explanation proposed by a great Romanian specialist in this field is that

„experience shows that any new and progressive norm, in international relations, makes its

way with difficulty, encountering numerous obstacles”

1

; indeed, concrete life and work at the

international level are evolving faster than their legal regulations, being needed sustained

efforts at institutional, jurisprudential and doctrinaire level in order to react to the new threats

and r isks to the international peace and security, after which, new threats arise again, which

1

D. Mazilu, Dreptul pcii, Academica Publishing House, Buchares t, 1983, p. 31.