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ICRC Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog

ICRC Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog

By: ICRC Law and Policy
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The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Humanitarian Law & Policy blog is a unique space for timely analysis and debate on international humanitarian law (IHL) issues and the policies that shape humanitarian action.All rights reserved Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Yesterday’s children: now is the time to repatriate the children – and the young people who have “aged out” of childhood – in the camps and prisons of north-east Syria and Iraq

    Yesterday’s children: now is the time to repatriate the children – and the young people who have “aged out” of childhood – in the camps and prisons of north-east Syria and Iraq
    22 Oct 2026
    Several years after the Islamic State group lost its last territory in March 2019, tens of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, and third-country nationals from around 60 countries – including many children – remained in camps and prisons in north-east Syria and Iraq. In early 2026, almost 6,000 detainees were transferred to Iraq, among them children who were caught up in a war they did not choose. Repatriation remains the best way forward for most of the third-country nationals – but a deeply disturbing trend concerns the exclusion of young third-country nationals who “age out” of childhood from repatriation efforts. In this post, ICRC Advisers Julia Joerin, Vanessa Murphy, and Katerina Kappos lay out why states should include young adults in repatriations as a standard practice, and call on states to reaffirm their commitment to resolving what continues to be one of the most complex and protracted child protection crises of our time.
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    18 min
  • AI will not set its own limits in warfare. States must.

    AI will not set its own limits in warfare. States must.
    15 Oct 2026
    Artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed at extraordinary speed, prompting warnings from within the technology industry itself that advances may be outpacing our ability to understand and control its risks. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in armed conflict. As militaries increasingly explore the integration of AI into weapons and military decision-making, technological capability can easily be mistaken for inevitability: if a system can be built, the assumption follows that it will eventually be deployed. History suggests otherwise. States have made choices before about which technologies of warfare to prohibit, constrain or refrain from using – and they face such a choice again today. In this post, ICRC Director of International Law, Movement and Partnerships Cordula Droege argues that abstract debates about the need to address the risks of AI should not distract from a concrete and achievable task already before states: establishing legally binding rules on autonomous weapon systems (AWS), including those incorporating AI. Drawing on the realities of deploying complex technologies in the unpredictable conditions of armed conflict, she explains why technical safeguards alone cannot resolve the humanitarian, legal and ethical concerns raised when weapons select and apply force without human intervention. Ahead of the Seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in November, she calls on states to turn more than a decade of work into clear prohibitions and restrictions on AWS, while there is still time to decide what role machines and algorithms should play in war.
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    18 min
  • Influencer, gamer, soldier, spy: the online era of child recruitment and its implications in international law (Part II)

    Influencer, gamer, soldier, spy: the online era of child recruitment and its implications in international law (Part II)
    8 Oct 2026
    As social media and gaming platforms create new interfaces between tech-savvy children and armed actors, new questions should be asked regarding how the law prohibiting child recruitment and use in hostilities can be promoted and enforced online. In this two-part post, ICRC Advisers Vanessa Murphy, Siobhan Sparkes McNamara, and Tilman Rodenhäuser consider how the digital environment is transforming more traditional forms of child recruitment, give a rough typology of related trends in the information and communications (ICT) environment, identify the relevant international law, and propose recommendations to improve compliance with these laws in the digital age.
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    20 min
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