Environmental Protection in armed conflict: Will the “silent victim” have a voice at last?

It is safe to assume that environmental protection is not the core business of the law of armed conflict, a regime specifically designed with a view to regulating the conduct of hostilities. It should not come as a surprise, then, that rules governing environmental matters in wartime – mainly represented by a very small number of provisions established under the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions – do not prove equal to the task of safeguarding the environment. Besides only applying to international armed conflicts, such provisions have a very limited temporal scope of application and establish very stringent requirements for their application. Against this background, two significant codification efforts were recently completed under the auspices of the ICRC and the ILC respectively. Even though scarcely innovative in nature, they may nonetheless provide some very helpful interpretative guidance, and contribute to filling the gaps in the existing regime. In addition to the law of armed conflict, international environmental law could further enhance environmental protection during hostilities, either by influencing the interpretation of the former or by applying alongside it. Both possibilities need to be carefully assessed pursuant to formal criteria as well as to more practical concerns, notably by taking into account the actual reality of hostilities and the relations between belligerents.