International Humanitarian Law on Prohibited Means of Warfare

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of international legal grounds of prohibiting usage of certain methods and means of warfare by belligerent parties. The sources and modern doctrine of Humanitarian law have not defined the notion of the “means of warfare”, often there is no distinction between the “methods” and “means”, which hampers classification of war conduct by the conflict parties in case of illegal implication of force and means.The author holds that means of warfare can be distinguished on a number of features and suggests classifying them depending on the criteria of lawfulness of their utilization, scale of usage, typical affecting factors, and spatial sphere of war conduct.

Keywords

• international humanitarian law
• prohibited means of war conduct
• classification of methods and means of warfare
• legal regulation of armed conflicts
• belligerents
• conventional weapons
• weapons of mass destruction