Enforcement: practice and potential

Over the past decades a broad range of international institutions, mechanisms and procedures have been set up to promote human rights, assist states in implementing human rights norms, scrutinize states’ adherence to these norms, prevent human rights violations and offer remedies for victims of such violations. The main human rights bodies created under international law – the UN Human Rights Council (and its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights), the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN treaty bodies, the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights – have all repeatedly been confronted with situations of armed conflict. A certain practice of human rights bodies with regard to armed conflicts has emerged which necessarily reflects a human rights view of armed conflict. What these bodies have to say on the continued application of human rights law in such situations and on the interplay of humanitarian law and human rights law can inform the debate on human rights in armed conflict and carries with it the authority of institutions specifically designed to promote and protect human rights at all times, even though situations of armed conflict did not take centre-stage in the mind of their creators.