x
x
Spades Spades Spades Spades Q Q Q Q
Are civilians who support or help the enemy legitimate targets?
What do you think? Consider the rights protecting civilians under International Law. When do civilians give up their protection?

• Civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities are protected under International Law, and should not be deliberately or directly targeted. For something to count as direct participation, it needs to be a lot more than simply providing food or shelter.

• Only once civilians directly participate in hostilities do they lose their protection and become legitimate targets.

• If you are in doubt as to whether someone is a combatant or non-combatant, you should consider a person a non-combatant, as difficult as it may be.

‘For lawyers and the Geneva Conventions, civilians may lose their protection if it can be shown that they have taken a “direct participation in hostilities”… As modern war has become increasingly industrialised it has drawn increasingly on organised civilian labour to build its tanks, aeroplanes, ships and weapons systems… Is the person who takes up arms in the fight for a part of his of her working day a combatant or a civilian or both? Are they only a legitimate target for the time they are actually on military duty, or can you also shoot them the next day when they are ploughing their fields or bathing their children?… Article 50 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions could see all [these debates] coming back in 1977 and insisted: “In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian” and “the presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character”.

Hugo Slim, Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War, (Hurst, London, 2007), p190,194.

x
x
x