Humanitarian Law Compliance

Ensuring humanitarian law compliance and repression of its violations receives constant reiteration but to mixed effect. While international judicial, jurisprudential and investigatory modalities have advanced, requisite State level competencies exhibit marked variability. This paper devotes most attention to disadvantaged States – those that, for whatever reason, lack the judicial, institutional or administrative capacity to ensure humanitarian law compliance and repression of its violations. Here a profile of 46 States is selected for review, 20 of which are identified as impacted by previous or continuing forms of armed conflict. Data from the World Justice Project’s 2020 Rule of Law Index is utilised. Chosen indicators assess individual State legislative, judicial, due process, and criminal investigatory capacities as perceived and recorded by local publics and individual experts. A comparative evaluation of this data reveals differences within profiles of disadvantaged States. They are investigated to better comprehend humanitarian law compliance challenges facing such States. They include international cooperation, utilisation of amnesties, and the conduct of armed non-state actors. The paper’s central thesis is that humanitarian law compliance, and repression of its violations, remains inadequate without remediation of the capacity impediments evident in disadvantaged States.