Hague Conventions

The Hague Conventions are international agreements adopted at two peace conferences in The Hague, in 1899 and 1907. They set down the laws and customs of war: how to treat prisoners, the population of occupied territory and neutral states, which weapons may not be used and what may not be attacked. During the Great War both sides constantly invoked them, accusing the enemy of breaking them.

Two conferences

The first conference was called on the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II, and its sessions opened on 18 May 1899. It adopted three conventions, including one on the laws and customs of war on land with annexed regulations, and three declarations. One of them banned projectiles whose sole object is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases. The second conference sat from 15 June to 18 October 1907 and adopted thirteen conventions, largely on naval warfare.

The most important were the regulations of land warfare, renewed in 1907 in the Fourth Convention. They forbade the use of poison and poisoned weapons and the attack or bombardment of undefended towns and villages, and in sieges they required buildings devoted to religion, art and science, as well as hospitals, to be spared as far as possible. Prisoners, officers excepted, could be put to work, but not on tasks connected with the operations of the war. Other conventions of that year restricted the laying of naval mines, forbade navies to bombard undefended ports and towns, protected hospital ships and required neutral states to intern foreign troops that took refuge on their soil.

The law in wartime

The conventions had a weak point. The regulations of land warfare applied only between states that had ratified them, and only if all the parties to the war had done so. Not every belligerent had ratified every agreement of 1907: Bulgaria, for example, had not accepted the convention on enemy merchant ships, and Britain had not ratified the Thirteenth Convention on neutrality at sea. Lawyers could therefore argue over whether a given rule applied at all.

Every violation nevertheless became an argument in the propaganda war. The burning of the library at Leuven in August 1914 broke the rule that buildings of learning were to be spared. When on 22 April 1915 the Germans released a cloud of chlorine at Ypres, the Allies regarded it as a breach of the ban on poison. The declaration of 1899 did speak of projectiles, whereas the poison gas there flowed from buried cylinders.

In 1916 Berlin sent prisoners to work as a reprisal, formally within the limits of the convention. In 1917–1918 German submarines sank hospital ships again and again, although the ships bore the markings the convention required: a white hull with a green band and red crosses.

Neutral states applied the conventions every day. After the fall of Antwerp in October 1914 the Netherlands interned some 30,000–40,000 Belgian soldiers. The United States gave German warships in its ports time for repairs and then interned those that did not sail.

After the war

After the war some cases came before the German Reich Court in Leipzig. In 1921 it acquitted the commander of the submarine that had sunk the hospital ship Dover Castle, finding that he had carried out an order of reprisal for Allied breaches of the convention. Two officers of U-86, which had sunk the Llandovery Castle and fired on her lifeboats, it sentenced to four years in prison.