Treatment of POWs. How often are Geneva Conventions rules ignored?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Mods please move if you think best. This didn’t seem to be a factual question (answers are gonna be varied), and it’s more serious than MPSIMS.

Anyway, in the fog of war, in intense combat, what would a country’s uniformed fighters do if they come across enemy troops who surrender, but the troops who are now in charge of these POWs do not have the wherewithal to abide by the rules of the 3rd Geneva Convention on POWs?

From Wikipedia, those rules require POWs to be:

  • Treated humanely with respect for their persons and their honor
  • Able to inform their next of kin and the International Committee of the Red Cross of their capture
  • Allowed to communicate regularly with relatives and receive packages
  • Given adequate food, clothing, housing, and medical attention
  • Paid for work done and not forced to do work that is dangerous, unhealthy, or degrading
  • Released quickly after conflicts end
  • Not compelled to give any information except for name, age, rank, and service number

Now, I’m envisioning very real scenarios that are probably occurring right now in Putin’s war on Ukraine, where combatants on either side encounter surrenderees (new word alert!), but themselves are being pursued by the enemy and so have no way to practically do any of those things listed above.

What is a military leader to do, as I said, in the fog of war and the chaos of combat?

Killing uniformed fighters who have surrendered would be a war crime, but if you can’t actually take in POWs because your unit is also coming under fire by the POWs’ colleagues-in-arms, what do you do?

Let them go, so they might later hook up with their units, which would very likely jeopardize your unit?

Is there an obligation to accept automatically someone who is surrendering to you? Can’t you kill them because you thought their waving the white flag was a trap? Or does that constitute a war crime?

Given the low morale of the Russian troops, quite a few have surrendered when confronted by Ukrainian forces, so I think my questions have real-world relevance.

A thought that came to my mind would be that a military unit’s leader could tell his soldiers to shoot each prisoner in a kneecap. You wouldn’t kill the surenderee, but it would be a violation of the 3rd Geneva Convention, for sure.

And it would be a very good wartime tactic, forcing your enemy to expend resources on the battlefield – caring for the injured soldiers – that would tempt a commander to stray from the rules on captured enemy combatants.

It seems to me that the GC rules on POWs are very unrealistic without a healthy dose of qualifiers to take into account very common real-world battlefield scenarios.

Thoughts?

2

The Geneva Conventions (and the oft-neglected Hague Conventions) were always about prosecuting the losers of the conflict rather than about any kind of enforceable international ‘laws’ preventing mistreatment of combatants or preventing excessive or deliberate injury to non-combattants. I don’t think you can find a war or major conflict in which such conventions were not copiously violated by all nations without internal disciplinary action, and for the most part nations have gotten around the letter of the law by not declaring war or labeling opponents as “enemy combatants” rather than soldiers.

The Ukrainians are certainly accepting surrender of some Russian troops and using their confessions and repudiations of the Russian invasion to good effect on social media but could hardly be blamed for not accepting mass surrender and providing food and medical aid given their pretty desperate situation notwithstanding the fact that Putin keeps insisting that the invasion is a “special operation” and “peacekeeping effort” instead of a declared war. Under the thesis that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, this would make the Russians not enemy soldiers in a war but violent criminals conducting a terrorist campaign, and Ukrainians can treat them in any way they see fit according to interpretation of their national statutes including summary execution, and there really isn’t anything that “international law” can say about it.

Stranger

3

The bottom line is that in a real shooting war, the only thing that really keeps combatants from breaking the “rules” is the prospect that the enemy can retaliate by breaking the rules themselves. That officer kneecapping prisoners? He shouldn’t expect any better treatment for his own troops I’d they are captured.

4

This is simply not correct. The 1949 Geneva Conventions were updates on the 1929 Conventions, precisely to recognise that conflicts could erupt without formal declarations of war. The four 1949 Conventions have a common statement of the definition of the Conventions, as stated in the second article of the 3rd Convention relating to POWs:

Russia and Ukraine are both parties to the 3rd Geneva Convention relating to the care of prisoners of war.

5

Is anyone really going to hole Ukrainian leaders or ‘soldier’—many of whom are actually partisans who have not formally joined the Ukrainian military—accountable for not adhering to the 3rd Convention in their treatment of invading Russian forces who are looting, rapine, deliberately attacking civilian habitats nd hospital, et cetera? Certainly not the US, which by a strict interpretation has clearly violated the conventions (and arguably even US law) in indefinite detention and torture of “enemy combatants”.

‘Rules’ like the Geneva and Hague Conventions really exist for the winners to prosecute the losers. Except for saving face, countries at war rarely make a genuine effort to adhere to them at a top decision-making level even when they’ve trained soldiers on how to comply with them at an operational level.

Stranger

6

Interesting points, but completely different from your earlier position that countries can avoid the Geneva Conventions by not declaring war. That’s what I responded to.

7

This was the rationale for the United States labelling prisoners “unlawful enemy combatants” and thus not protected by the 1949 Geneva convention:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docindex/v2_cou_us_rule3

Whether this “rules lawyering” is valid or not is subject to debate among academics but it allowed the US to extrajudicially rendition ‘detainees’ to the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and other ‘black site’ prisons in various Eastern European countries with no more then token objections by the international community because in the work of prosecution of war crimes “might makes right”.

Stranger

8

Thanks for the interesting info, everyone.

Regarding Mr. Fudd’s comment regarding kneecapping and that leading to the expectation that the other side would do the same: That leads me to believe that the most practical thing to do would be to execute the captives, but make it look like they died from wounds received in battle. I’m sure that’s happed before.

But of course, that would be an unlawful order, and there could be a shit show afterwards if anyone spoke up about it at war’s end – and repercussions within the unit directed against a fellow soldier for not being a team player if he refused to participate.

In other words, war is hell.

9

That, and the idea that if you lose, the victors will go after you, both nationally and personally for violating those “laws”, even if they broke the same laws, or other ones themselves.

So when you’re talking about insurgencies like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc… there’s no real legal basis for sticking religiously to the letter of the law, as the Viet Cong/Mahdi Army/Taliban/ISIS, etc… aren’t signatories.

But in large part, it’s just easier for countries like the US to stick with them as a general way of doing business, instead of having to prove out and supply stuff like soft-point ammunition for Iraq/Afghanistan, it’s WAY easier to just use the regular old Conventions-compliant FMJ in pretty much every situation (including snipers) than to try and source, test, and supply some sort of soft-point ammunition of greater lethality.

And training works similarly I suspect- it’s just easier to train your troops and officers to obey the most strict version of the Conventions that you would expect to fight under, rather than have it be situational.

10

If someone surrenders to your military, and you then cripple them by shooting them, and then just abandon them, not providing food, shelter or medical care, you’re killing them. It just doesn’t happen right away. Whether they survive or not, it’s a war crime.

11

An interesting turn of events: Ukraine promises "immediate investigation" after video surfaces of soldiers shooting Russian prisoners

12

OK but what if the party violating the provisions of The Convention are NOT actual members of the Ukraine Military but simply Ukrainian civilians who decided to fight back against the Russians?

13

I asked pretty much the same question over here last week.

14

Good question. Both the British and German armies and police stopped civilians from beating downed pilots in WWII. I doubt that Ukrainian authorities would stop civilians from killing Russian soldiers.

15

It should be noted that “punishment” for war crimes has not been dependent on the Geneva Convention. Not agreeing to the Convention as it related to treatment of POWs did not help Japanese war criminals, who violated other pacts and even their own laws.

“Japan signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Prisoners of War and the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Sick and Wounded,[20] but the Japanese government declined to ratify the POW Convention. In 1942, the Japanese government stated that it would abide by the terms of the Convention mutatis mutandis (‘changing what has to be changed’).[21] The crimes committed also fall under other aspects of international and Japanese law. For example, many of the crimes committed by Japanese personnel during World War II broke Japanese military law, and were subject to court martial, as required by that law.[22] The Empire also violated international agreements signed by Japan, including provisions of the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907) such as protections for prisoners of war and a ban on the use of chemical weapons, the 1930 Forced Labour Convention which prohibited forced labor, the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children which prohibited human trafficking, and other agreements.[23][24] The Japanese government also signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1929), thereby rendering its actions in 1937–45 liable to charges of crimes against peace,[25] a charge that was introduced at the Tokyo Trials to prosecute “Class A” war criminals.”

It is ironic (if irony is a proper term) that the Japanese military treated Russian prisoners of war well during the 1905 conflict, only to slide into barbarism by the 1930s under the Japanese militarist/imperialist regime.