A presentation by Andrew Clapham, Geneva Graduate Institute. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium under the "Human Rights in Times of War" cluster hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
This column argues that it no longer makes sense to speak about the 'moral equality of soldiers' or a soldier's 'licence to kill' in wartime. International law now imposes individual criminal responsibility on those involved in the crime of aggression. International human rights law considers lives lost as a result of aggression to be arbitrary deprivations of the right to life and therefore the responsibility of the aggressor state. The individual soldiers on the aggressor side can be considered liable for contributing to acts violating the UN Charter and human rights law. This can lead to concrete legal consequences, such as becoming ineligible for asylum or liability to being individually sanctioned. Once we consider that all the lives lost as a result of aggression are human rights violations, this changes how violations of the right to life are reported and calculated. All soldiers and civilians killed as a result of a state's aggression are victims of human rights violations, and the claims of their survivors are just starting to be heard.
Andrew Clapham is Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute. He was the first Director of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights (June 2006 - July 2014). He teaches international human rights law, the laws of war, and public international law. Prior to coming to the Institute in 1997, he was the Representative of Amnesty International at the United Nations in New York. Andrew Clapham has worked as Special Adviser on Corporate Responsibility to High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, and Adviser on International Humanitarian Law to Sergio Vieira de Mello, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Iraq. He was elected as a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists in 2013. He served as a member of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan from 2017 to 2023.
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