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François Picard is pleased to welcome the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric. “You may consider war a human condition,” argues Spoljaric. “But brutality, barbarity, is not a human condition.” Her warning recalls the fundamental premise of the 1949 Geneva Conventions: even in war, there can be no lawless space, and certain red lines must never be crossed.
War may be an enduring feature of human history, but its brutality is neither inevitable nor beyond restraint. That distinction lies at the heart of a stark warning from Spoljaric who argues that the international rules established to protect civilians are being progressively weakened amid proliferating armed conflicts, technological transformations and the retreat of diplomacy.
From Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and Yemen, Spoljaric describes an increasingly permissive interpretation of international humanitarian law, in which civilian infrastructure is attacked, populations are displaced and human suffering becomes an instrument of military strategy. “So humans are instrumentalized in the pursuit of military objectives,” she says
