Geneva Conventions guidelines during wartime

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• Although Russia is a party to the Geneva Conventions, its armed forces continue to systematically and defiantly violate international humanitarian law in Ukraine.

• The Geneva Conventions are a set of four treaties, formalised in 1949, and three additional protocols.

• It contains the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war. They protect people who do not take part in the fighting and those who can no longer fight.

• First Geneva Convention protects wounded and sick soldiers on land during war.

• Second Geneva Convention protects wounded, sick and shipwrecked military personnel at sea during war.

• Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war.

• Fourth Geneva Convention protects civilians, including those in occupied territory.

Common Article 3

• Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions, marked a breakthrough, as it covered, for the first time, situations of non-international armed conflicts.

• They include traditional civil wars, internal armed conflicts that spill over into other States or internal conflicts in which third States or a multinational force intervenes alongside the government.