US Mission Geneva

Harold Hongju Koh: “The rule of law is the cornerstone of President Obama’s approach to national security policy. As everyone here is aware, the relationship between the United States and the Geneva Conventions has been the subject of much international commentary since September 11, 2001 …Today, it is clear that individuals taken into custody by the United States must, as a matter of law, be treated humanely.”

This audience needs no instruction about the importance of the Geneva Conventions – not only to the civilian populations who suffer from the horrors of war and receive assistance, not only to those in uniform who engage on the field of battle and receive protection, but to all who care about building a more compassionate world community based on cooperation and interdependence and the rule of law. For hundreds of years, there were no standards, no rules, no rights or wrongs about what could be done to those taken captive in the course of battle. For hundreds of years, there was barbarity not only in the treatment of combatants captured on the field of battle but also in the treatment of civilian populations caught up in the midst of war. The signing of the Geneva Conventions brought hope that there would be change. And although we have made progress in some ways, it would be quite wrong to suggest that that was then and all’s right with the world now, that with the arrival of the Geneva Conventions, all the problems of cruelty in wartime were solved. It is a sad fact, for example, that the 1990s was a decade that witnessed the worst civilian-to-combatant ratio of deaths in recorded history. And it is even more disappointing that, in recent years when we resorted to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques the United States fell short.