International Humanitarian Law is at Breaking Point – but not Beyond Repair
GENEVA, February 17 (IPS) - International humanitarian law is at a breaking point, as rampant impunity for serious violations is enabling even greater abuses against civilians and detainees.
Across today’s wars, violations are no longer concealed or exceptional. They are increasingly open, systematic, and unpunished, with catastrophic consequences for those whom the law is supposed to protect.
New analysis of 23 situations of armed conflict between July 2024 and the end of 2025 reveals a consistent pattern: civilians are being killed, abused and starved at scale, while accountability mechanisms either falter or are actively undermined. Genocidal violence in Gaza, a renewed risk of genocide in Sudan, and mass atrocities elsewhere are not isolated horrors. Taken together, they point to a deeper failure – the collapse of meaningful restraint in the conduct of hostilities.
Conflict-related sexual violence has reached epidemic levels. Rape, sexual slavery, and sexual violence used as punishment or as a tool of territorial control have been documented across multiple conflicts, including in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, and Sudan. Particularly alarming is the growing number of cases involving attacks children, including victims as young as one.
These are not by-products of war, but violations long prohibited under international humanitarian law, now committed with near-total impunity. This occurs with the complicity of many other States, which have a duty to respect and ensure respect international humanitarian law.
This erosion of civilian protection is not primarily the result of gaps in legal knowledge. The rules exist. The problem is political choice – and a persistent failure to enforce, clarify and update the law where it no longer offers meaningful restraint.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the global arms trade. The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty has been widely ratified, including by major exporters such as China, France, and the United Kingdom. In theory, it requires its member States to deny arms transfers where there is a clear risk that weapons will be used to commit serious violations of international law. In practice, legal risk assessments are all too often overridden by strategic and political considerations.
Continued arms exports to Israel, Russia, and others, despite overwhelming evidence of civilian harm, have had devastating consequences on the ground.
Closing this gap does not require a raft of new rules in the short term. It requires the consistent application of existing ones: enforceable, evidence-based export controls; independent scrutiny of licensing decisions; and real accountability where transfers are authorised despite a clear risk that the law will be breached by the recipient.
Certain categories of weapons are though incompatible with the protection of civilians, but do not necessarily violate the already permissive standards. Repeated firing into populated areas of gravity ordnance from the air and inaccurate long-range artillery from the ground has been a major driver of civilian casualties across multiple conflicts.
There is a fundamental lack of clarity on two key rules: first, how close an attack may be launched to a military target while still complying with the law; and second, how much incidental civilian harm is permissible when targeting a military objective.
On both issues, the law urgently requires clarification. Restricting air-delivered weapons to precision-guided munitions alone would already make a measurable difference to civilian survival. Achieving this, however, requires States to clarify and update the rules of international humanitarian law that were drafted in the 1970s.
In State-on-State conflicts such as in Kherson province in Ukraine, drones have been used by Russian forces – and others – to target civilians, sometimes with real-time video footage disseminated online by the perpetrators.
At the same time, armed drones are no longer the preserve of States. Their use by non-State armed groups is increasing rapidly, including by JNIM in the Sahel, Islamic State in Somalia, and the Arakan Army in Myanmar. There is an urgent need for stronger mechanisms to attribute, investigate, and prosecute unlawful drone and autonomous weapon attacks.
Impunity on this scale is not inevitable. It is the product of sustained political and financial neglect. Institutions designed to promote compliance with international humanitarian law – including domestic courts and international tribunals – are under severe strain, with some facing paralysis or closure due to lack of resources.
Judges at bodies such as the International Criminal Court have even been sanctioned simply for carrying out their mandates. If States are serious about protecting civilians, political and financial support for these institutions must be treated as a core obligation and a policy priority, not an optional gesture.
The current moment represents a critical test for international humanitarian law itself. The international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht once warned that the law existed at the “vanishing point” of international law. That warning is no longer theoretical.
Whether humanitarian law continues to function as a real constraint on warfare, or recedes into symbolic rhetoric, will depend on the political choices states make now – and on whether civilian protection is treated as a legal duty rather than a discretionary one.
Stuart Casey-Maslen is an international lawyer and lead author of War Watch: International Humanitarian Law in Focus at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights
IPS UN Bureau
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