Geneva Protocol
The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, usually called the Geneva Protocol, is a treaty prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in international armed conflicts. It was signed at Geneva on 17 June 1925 and entered into force on 8 February 1928. It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 7 September 1929.[4] The Geneva Protocol is a protocol to the Convention for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War signed on the same date, and followed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.
For other uses, see Geneva Protocol (disambiguation).
It prohibits the use of "asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices" and "bacteriological methods of warfare". This is now understood to be a general prohibition on chemical weapons and biological weapons between state parties, but has nothing to say about production, storage or transfer. Later treaties did cover these aspects – the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
A number of countries submitted reservations when becoming parties to the Geneva Protocol, declaring that they only regarded the non-use obligations as applying to other parties and that these obligations would cease to apply if the prohibited weapons were used against them.[5][6]
Eric Croddy, assessing the Protocol in 2005, took the view that the historic record showed it had been largely ineffectual. Specifically it does not prohibit:[11]
In light of these shortcomings, Jack Beard notes that "the Protocol (...) resulted in a legal framework that allowed states to conduct [biological weapons] research, develop new biological weapons, and ultimately engage in [biological weapons] arms races".[6]
As such, the use of chemical weapons inside the nation's own territory against its citizens or subjects employed by Spain in the Rif War until 1927,[12][13] Japan against Seediq indigenous rebels in Taiwan (then part of the Japanese colonial empire) in 1930 during the Musha Incident, Iraq against ethnic Kurdish civilians in the 1988 attack on Halabja during the Iran–Iraq War, and Syria or Syrian opposition forces during the Syrian civil war did not breach the Geneva Protocol.[14]
Despite the U.S. having been a proponent of the protocol, the U.S. military and American Chemical Society lobbied against it, causing the U.S. Senate not to ratify the protocol until 1975, the same year when the United States ratified the Biological Weapons Convention.[11][15]
Violations[edit]
Several state parties have deployed chemical weapons for combat in spite of the treaty. Italy used mustard gas against the Ethiopian Empire in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. In World War II, Germany employed chemical weapons in combat on several occasions along the Black Sea, notably in Sevastopol, where they used toxic smoke to force Russian resistance fighters out of caverns below the city. They also used asphyxiating gas in the catacombs of Odesa in November 1941, following their capture of the city, and in late May 1942 during the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula in eastern Crimea, perpetrated by the Wehrmacht's Chemical Forces and organized by a special detail of SS troops with the help of a field engineer battalion.[16] After the battle in mid-May 1942, the Germans gassed and killed almost 3,000 of the besieged and non-evacuated Red Army soldiers and Soviet civilians hiding in a series of caves and tunnels in the nearby Adzhimushkay quarry.[17]
During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Iraq is known to have employed a variety of chemical weapons against Iranian forces. Some 100,000 Iranian troops were casualties of Iraqi chemical weapons during the war.[18][19][20]
Subsequent interpretation of the protocol[edit]
In 1966, United Nations General Assembly resolution 2162B called for, without any dissent, all states to strictly observe the protocol. In 1969, United Nations General Assembly resolution 2603 (XXIV) declared that the prohibition on use of chemical and biological weapons in international armed conflicts, as embodied in the protocol (though restated in a more general form), were generally recognized rules of international law.[21] Following this, there was discussion of whether the main elements of the protocol now form part of customary international law, and now this is widely accepted to be the case.[15][22]
There have been differing interpretations over whether the protocol covers the use of harassing agents, such as adamsite and tear gas, and defoliants and herbicides, such as Agent Orange, in warfare.[15][23] The 1977 Environmental Modification Convention prohibits the military use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects. Many states do not regard this as a complete ban on the use of herbicides in warfare, but it does require case-by-case consideration.[24] The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention effectively banned riot control agents from being used as a method of warfare, though still permitting it for riot control.[25]
In recent times, the protocol had been interpreted to cover non-international armed conflicts as well international ones. In 1995, an appellate chamber in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia stated that "there had undisputedly emerged a general consensus in the international community on the principle that the use of chemical weapons is also prohibited in internal armed conflicts." In 2005, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded that customary international law includes a ban on the use of chemical weapons in internal as well as international conflicts.[26]
However, such views drew general criticism from legal authors. They noted that much of the chemical arms control agreements stems from the context of international conflicts. Furthermore, the application of customary international law to banning chemical warfare in non-international conflicts fails to meet two requirements: state practice and opinio juris. Jillian Blake & Aqsa Mahmud cited the periodic use of chemical weapons in non-international conflicts since the end of WWI (as stated above) as well as the lack of existing international humanitarian law (such as the Geneva Conventions) and national legislation and manuals prohibiting using them in such conflicts.[27] Anne Lorenzat stated the 2005 ICRC study was rooted in "'political and operational issues rather than legal ones".[28]