A Declaration of Minimum Humanitarian Standards

Abstract

The readers of this Journal are familiar with the difficulties experienced in protecting human dignity in situations of internal violence that fall below the thresholds of applicability of international humanitarian instruments but within the margin of public emergency; the governments directly concerned often promote this interpretation of such situations, enabling them to invoke the derogations clauses of international human rights instruments. These difficulties are compounded by the inadequacy of the nonderogable provisions of human rights instruments, the weakness of international monitoring and control procedures, and the need to define the character of the conflict situations (the applicability of certain norms of humanitarian law depends on such characterization, which is usually difficult and contested). Experience indicates that in situations of internal violence, normal constitutional and other legal checks and balances are singularly ineffective. Efforts have already been made to address some of the abuses typical of these situations, but the abuses continue unabated.