Article

Human rights and humanitarian law : conflict or convergence

Christopher Greenwood

• Case Western Reserve journal of international law, Vol. 43, no. 1 & 2, 2010, p. 491-512

English

Frederick K. Cox International Law Center Lecture in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.

The relationship between the international law of human rights and international humanitarian law is a highly controversial topical subject. To one group, everything that happens in the war on terror and, in particular at Guantanamo, is a matter solely for the laws of war. It fits into the box marked "humanitarian law" so that human rights law has nothing whatever to do with it. To another group, it is a human rights and law-enforcement issue that has little or nothing to do with the laws of war. The lecturer tries to show that neither of those two perspectives gives the whole truth. Neither is a self-contained entity and their keenest proponents do themselves a disservice by pretending that the two bodies of law are mutually exclusive and must always be in conflict. A human rights lawyer should be a humanitarian lawyer as well. Similarly, particularly, a military lawyer, cannot today overlook the dimension of the international law of human rights. It’s a matter of being a good lawyer rather than being a human rights lawyer or a humanitarian lawyer.

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• Lawfare ! / Michael P. Scharf... [et al.]