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A new body of multilateral treaties sought to limit the possibilities for the outbreak of war and to curtail the scope of warfare. Japan signed the 1856 Declaration of Paris and the Geneva Convention of 1864 in the 1880s, and participated prominently in the two Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Japan’s facility with the international laws of war was put to the test in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Japan demonstrated to the West that its “civilized warfare” respected Japan’s commitments to the laws of war, and Japan’s exploitation of gaps in the law was put to good use at The Hague, when Japan helped to revise the laws of neutrality, maritime warfare, and declarations of war in order to change the rules of what had formerly been an exclusive European club.

The Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 defined international standards for the just conduct of war and the proper treatment of civilians. From the first days of fighting in 1914, the belligerent powers accused one another of ignoring them. (1) Press campaigns against "enemy atrocities" were designed to stir patriotic emotion; governments employed commissions and experts to document the enemy's misdeeds. (2) Their findings justified war crimes charges presented at Versailles in 1919. The political motivation behind such claims and the lurid terms in which they were often couched led skeptics at the time and in retrospect to question their foundation. (3) Indeed, some of the stories assumed the fantastic proportions of myth, but many documented actual abuses. (4) The pattern began with the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914, followed by the destruction of monuments and cities in Belgium and France, inspiring outrage across Europe. The Germans in return justified their conduct as a response to civilian aggression.50n the Eastern and Southeastern fronts, the Germans and Austrians faced an opponent with a reputation for what Europeans deemed uncivilized behavior, the anti-Jewish pogroms often cited as prime example. (6) By mid-August 1914, the Germans were already condemning as "Russian atrocities" (Russische Greueltaten) the murder and arson perpetrated by Cossack troops in East Prussia. (7) In early October, a group of distinguished German scientists and scholars published an "Appeal to the Civilized World," denying their nation had disregarded the laws of war, while protesting the "blood of women and children slaughtered by the Russian hordes" in the east. (8) One incident at the very start of the war gave Russians the opportunity to position themselves as the moral equivalent of the suffering Belgians and offset their image as the eastern analogue to Germanic barbarity. This incident involved the modest textile town of Kalisz, located on the Prosna River, at the outermost limit of the Kingdom of Poland, not far from the Prussian border. Like all Polish towns and cities, Kalisz contained a mix of cultures. Half of the almost 25,000 residents were Roman Catholic, a third Jewish. These proportions had remained stable for 50 years, despite continuous expansion culminating ina spurt of prosperity after the opening in 1902 of a railway connecting Russia and Prussia through Kalisz and the industrial powerhouse of Lodz. (9) In 1897, three-quarters of city residents considered Polish their native tongue (reflecting the degree of Jewish cultural adaptation). About 10 percent were either Russian-speaking Eastern Orthodox or German-speaking Protestants and Catholics. Manufacture was dominated by Poles, commerce by Jews. The wealthiest residents were mostly Polish, the military and bureaucracy mostly Russian. (10) The German sack of Kalisz during the first two weeks of August 1914 became a cause celebre in the Russian press. The attack was a textbook case of wartime atrocity in two senses. First, in terms of what occurred, German behavior anticipated the excesses soon to follow in Belgium. Second, in terms of how it was represented, the accounts of all interested parties--Russians, Germans, and Poles--used the evidence to convey a political message, shaping the Kalisz story with an eye to public opinion, both at home and abroad. Despite their different perspectives, the versions offered by the victims, both Russians and Poles, share two striking features: on the one hand, the inability of those who experienced the events to determine how exactly the violence began; on the other, the absence, under circumstances in which opportunities for mutual hatred abounded, of the ethnic stereotypes that otherwise pervaded wartime opinion. This omission is all the more noteworthy, as anti-Jewish feeling was hardly confined to the Slavic Eastern front; nor was it necessarily blunted by horror at German aggression. …

During the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of people have been victims of extrajudicial executions worldwide, in episodes of violence associated with armed conflicts, political repression and ethnic cleansing (Shelton 2005). From the crimes committed during the Second World War, to the political repression in dictatorial regimes in Latin America (e.g. Chile, Argentina, Guatemala) and east Asia (e.g. Cambodia), to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, central Africa and the Middle East, in most of these cases the victims of the killings have been illegally buried in clandestine mass graves. In this context, we define a mass grave after the definition provided by the United Nations special rapporteur to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a location where three or more bodies are buried, victims of extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, not having died in combat or armed confrontations (ICTY 1996). In many cases, forensic projects have been organized in order to exhume and identify theremains of the victims from these mass graves. The main immediate objectives of these forensic projects have been the return of the remains to the families and/or the collection of evidence to establish accountability and bring those responsible to justice (although in all cases there should be an ethical and practical commitment for personal identification of the remains). More generally, the information obtained from these projects, together with information obtained from interviews of survivals, relatives of the victims, witnesses and perpetrators, fulfil the role of a public recognition of the episodes of violence and reaffirmation of the dignity of the victims, with the twofold objective of avoiding denial of those episodes and of their divulgation for a critical rejection of violence (Haglund 2002). Some of the earliest exhumations of mass graves were related to the Second World War,1for example those carried out at Katyn (Russia), where thousands of officers of the Polish armywere executed and buried in mass graves by members of the Soviet Army in 1940. Subsequently, the Nazi Army (1943) and the Soviet Army (1944) carried out exhumations of these graves, although the main objective of both projects was to collect evidence of the killings for accusing the opponent (Taylor 1992). Legally, the search for systematic crimes against civil population goes back to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 (including the Martens Clause that provided the distinction between combatant and non-combatant populations), the Leipzig War Crime Trials after the First World War, and especially the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials after the Second World War, which used large-scale forensic evidence for the prosecution of war crimes. The reconstruction of international relations after Second World War resulted in the foundation of the United Nations and Resolution 95-I of 1946, which consolidated the notion of crimes against humanity and notion of crimes of war (Ball 1999; Capella 2011; Valencia 2011). With regard to the exhumation of mass graves, the next significant advance came with the denunciations of crimes committed by the Latin American dictatorial regimes during the 1970s and 1980s, and the subsequent foundation in 1984 of the first forensic team dedicated to the search of missing persons, the Argentinian Team of Forensic Anthropology (Doretti and Snow 2003). After this initiative followed the development of the first protocol for the investigation and prevention of arbitrary executions and documentation of torture (United Nations 1991), the investigation of mass graves from the Second World War in Ukraine in 1990 (Bevan 1994) and especially the implementation by United Nations of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994, both of which have made extensive use of the information obtained from the exhumation and analysis of human remains from mass graves. During the 1990s, diverse national (e.g. Guatemala, Peru) and international (e.g. United Nations, Physicians for Human Rights, International Commission for Missing Persons) forensic teams were created and exhumations of mass graves have been carried out worldwide by these and other teams, with bioarchaeologists playing an important role alongside forensic pathologists and other professionals (Skinner et al. 2003; Skinner and Sterenberg 2005). This brief summary of the killings involving civil populations and their subsequent investiga-tion during the twentieth century should include Spain. On 18 July 1936, a fascist coup promoted by a faction of the Spanish army was carried out against the elected government of the Spanish Republic, unleashing a civil war that lasted three years (1936-9) and ended in an extreme right-wing dictatorship led by General Franco, who remained in power until his death in 1975. It has been estimated that during the Spanish Civil War and the first ten years of the dictatorship that followed, at least 175,000 people were killed away from the battlefield, most of them buried in mass graves. This number refers to “violent deaths away from the frontline, excluding bombing of defenseless cities. Victims of paseos, sacas, shootings at the walls of cemeteries, executions carried out by death sentences from martial courts or popular tribunals” (Julia 1999: 407-14). Unlike other cases of systematic human rights violations, these crimes have not been officially investigated by any legitimate Spanish government, commission or court, and the investigation of the pattern of violence exerted in the territories controlled by both sides has been conducted by historians (Julia 1999; Espinosa 2009, 2012; Preston 2012). One of the most recent investigations indicate that the Republican violence had cost the lives of 49,000 people, while the Francoist violence had cost the lives of at least 127,000 (Preston 2012). Consistent with this lack of official investigation, there has been no official forensic exhumation project of the mass graves. Nevertheless, exhumations of mass graves occurred during the immediate post-war period, promoted by the dictatorship in order to identify victims of Republican violence, and during the last years of dictatorship and the transition to democracy (1975-82), when hundreds of exhumations were carried out to recover the victims of Francoist violence by the familiesthemselves, without any state support (e.g. Aguirre 2008). These exhumations declined after the attempted coup of 23 February 1981, but in 2000 a Spanish journalist searching for his grandfather contacted an archaeologist, a physical anthropologist and a forensic doctor, who carried out the first exhumation of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War using archaeological methods (Silva and Macias 2003). The remains of 13 persons were exhumed and the grandfather of the journalist was identified. That exhumation sparked a large number of requests for exhumations and – according to a database managed by the Society of Sciences Aranzadi (Donostia, Basque Country), the purpose of which is to compile basic data from the exhumations carried out in Spain – to date 330 mass graves have been exhumed and 6,174 remains have been recovered at the request of families of Republicans, with the objective of identify the remains and burying them in a legal and dignified place. The lack of a legal instrument to deal seriously with the investigation of the human rights violations that occurred in Spain during the civil war and the dictatorship has resulted in the absence, or partial support, of the Spanish public administrations to the exhumations. The responsibility for this task has been delegated to the families of the victims, who have personally contacted professionals from different disciplines to carry out the exhumation and identification process. In this highly criticized model of exhumations (Escudero 2011), our team has participated in more than 50 exhumations of mass graves from different Spanish provinces, and the results of our main objective – the identification and return of the remains to the families – has been described elsewhere (Rios et al. 2010, 2012; Etxeberria et al. 2012). As previously mentioned, the main objective of the exhumations of victims of systematichuman rights violations should be the identification of the remains, but as indicated by TidballBinz (2008: xii), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) recommended a focus “on the proper recovery, management and identification and human remains, with the understanding that this is as important as establishing the cause, manner, and circumstances of death of the deceased”. Furthermore, Baraybar and Gasior (2006: 103) explained that “the analysis of the signs of peri-mortem trauma by the anthropologist ultimately leads the pathologist to make a determination as to the individual’s cause of death, which is vital to the prosecution of war crimes”. As explained above, there is no such investigation or prosecution of these crimes in Spain, and our skeletal analysis is focused on the identification of the remains, but we also proceed to a detailed study of the peri-mortem trauma as a mandatory part of our report in order to provide as much information as possible with regard to the clarification of the cause, manner and circumstances of death, as well as to leave a record that may be useful for professionals working in other cases of systematic violations of human rights. The objective of this chapter is therefore to present the first systematic description of the peri-mortem trauma observed in skeletons exhumed from mass graves from the Spanish Civil War.

Since the number of women who actually participated in war was insignificant until the outbreak of World War I, the need for special protection for them was not felt prior to that time. This does not imply however that women had previously lacked any protection. From the birth of international humanitarian law, they had had the same general legal protection as men. If they were wounded, women were protected by the provisions of the 1864 Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field; if they became prisoners of war, they benefited from the Regulations annexed to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War on Land.

N September 1963, President Kennedy sent two American officials to have 'a fresh look' at the situation in South Vietnam. Mr Joseph Mendenhall was an experienced diplomat who had previously served as political counsellor in the United States Embassy in Saigon. MajorGeneral Victor Krulak was the Pentagon's top-ranking expert in counterinsurgency warfare. The two men spent an exhausting four days in South Vietnam and then returned to Washington with such diametrically opposed assessments that President Kennedy was moved to ask, 'You two did visit the same country, didn't you? ' 1 The difficulty about facts is that there are so many of them. Facts, or alleged facts, pour into the United Nations headquarters in a continuous flood-speeches of delegates; conversations, formal and informal, between representatives of governments and UN officials; written communications from other international bodies, governments, would-be governments, non-governmental organisations (some formally recognised, some not), and individuals; reports from UN agencies and officials in the field; information in books, monographs, journals, newspapers, or otherwise in the public domain. The difficulty for the United Nations is not how to accumulate information but how to avoid being suffocated by it; and, secondly, how to distinguish between objective facts and slanted information provided for partisan purposes. Nor is the UN short of standing fact-finding machinery. The General Assembly has expressly conferred fact-finding responsibilities on the Interim Committee (the so-called Little Assembly) and the Peace Observation Commission, and has established both a Panel for Inquiry and Conciliation and a Register of Experts for fact-finding. The principal UN organs, including the International Court of Justice, may create ad hoc bodies for enquiry or fact-finding as needed. In addition, many UN members are parties to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 for the peaceful settlement of disputes, or to bilateral, regional, or general treaties providing for international enquiry. UN fact-finding may be classified in various ways; by the type of body set up to establish the facts, by the kind of situation to be investi

In its reply to the identical notes sent by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes on February 9, 1946, to the Chinese and Soviet Governmenats concerning the disposition of Japanese external assets, the Government of China stated that the claim of the Soviet Government "that all Japanese enterprises in the Chinese Northeastern Provinces which had rendered services to the Japanese Army were regarded by the Soviet Union as war booty of Soviet forces"2 is considered by the Chinese Government "'as far exceeding the scope of war booty as generally recognized by international law and international usage." I The international law applicable to war booty is found in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 which, though flagrantly violated in both World Wars by the German Government, remain supported and respected by most governments and international law authorities. Convention IV of the 1907 Hague Conference, in consonance with the growth of humane sentiments respecting war, partly as fostered by such men as Vattel and Wellington, defines the rights and obligations of the occupying armies based on pure military necessity and for the sole purpose of bringing the enemy to quick surrender.2 It therefore states in precise language the nature and role of the occupying state and imposes upon it more obligations than rights.

International humanitarian law applicable in armed conflict has been codified in two parallel streams known, somewhat confusingly, as the law of Geneva and the law of the Hague. The law of Geneva was designed to ensure respect, protection, and humane treatment of those who are taking no direct part in the fighting (wounded, sick, or shipwrecked combatants, medical services, military chaplains, prisoners of war, and civilians) while the law of the Hague laid down the rights and duties of belligerents, including prohibitions and restrictions governing the conduct of military operations. Part of the confusion to which I refer arises from the fact that the law of the Hague includes instruments identified with other cities (the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 on chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons (CBW), and the 1981 Geneva Convention and Protocols on indiscriminate or excessively cruel weapons). The [Hague] Conference is unanimous in thinking that it is extremely desirable that the usages of war should be defined and regulated. In this spirit it has adopted a great number of provisions which have for their object the determination of the rights and of the duties of belligerents and of populations, and for their end the reduction and softening of the evils of war, so far as military necessities permit. It has not always been possible to come to an agreement that henceforth all these stipulations should apply to all practical cases. On the other hand, it could not possibly be the intention of the Conference that unforeseen cases should, in the absence of written stipulations, be left to the arbitrary decision of those who commanded the army. In awaiting the time when a complete code of the laws of war may be elaborated and proclaimed, the Conference considers it opportune to state that in cases not provided for in the Articles of this date, populations and belligerents remain under the safeguards and government of the principles of international law, resulting from the customs established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity, and the demands of public conscience … —Statement submitted by Fedor Fedorovich Martens, the Russian legal expert, to the Hague Conference on 20 June 1899 which, with stylistic amendments, was incorporated in the preamble to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 on the laws and customs of war on land, the last sentence of which was also incorporated in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the two Geneva Protocols of 1977, and the Convention on indiscriminate or excessively injurious weapons of 1981.

Poisons and toxic agents have been used through the ages as a method of warfare, although their use has always been widely condemned. Already a century ago, the Brussels Declaration of 1874 and later the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited the use of poisons and poisoned bullets in warfare, and a separate declaration of the 1899 Hague Convention condemned the use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.

The work on which Helmuth now embarked involved a major issue of principle. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 about the laws of war had been drawn up in days when wars were still thought of as things fought by rival armies, with civilian life remaining relatively unaffected. Once the object of war was extended beyond the defeat of the enemy army in the field to the destruction of its supplies and therefore to the continued capacity for resistance of its industrial machine and population, many of the rules became inadequate and a host of new situations arose for which no agreed rules existed. Air warfare, with its inability to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, added a further complication. In this situation, and more particularly in Germany in 1939, the lawyers faced two alternatives.

The question of reservations to multilateral treaties has aroused much interest in recent years since an established procedure seems to tremble or even to collapse. Before the first world war no problem existed. Reservations to treaties were tendered either on or before signature and were permitted only if accepted by all other signatories. Several States made reservations to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, but none of them protested when the Netherlands Government did not accept them as parties until the other signatories to the conventions had agreed to their reservations. The practice of asking the consent of all the signatories proved workable in an era when multilateral treaties were rare and the attention paid to them was considerable, when furthermore the parties to a treaty had always participated in its drafting.