POWs, Civilians and the Post-War Development of International Humanitarian Law

Abstract

First paragraph: This chapter takes as its starting point a discussion that took place at the first postwar conference of the International Law Association (ILA), held in Portsmouth, England, in May1920. While the founding of the League of Nations the previous January provided the assembled jurists with plenty to debate, the conference organizers were eager to progress thinking on two areas of law that had been found wanting in the Great War: the law of the sea and the law governing the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). As Lord Younger, the conference chair, noted in his opening remarks, the existing regulations dealing with POWs—the 1899/1907 Hague rules—had proved utterly “powerless to prevent in innumerable notorious instances the suffering, undeserved, gratuitous, heartrending beyond expression, which thousands of prisoners had to endure through these tragic years of horror.” To help sharpen the discussions, two of Britain’s foremost international lawyers, Hugh Bellot and George G. Phillimore, were invited to table a draft convention for POWs.