THE ADVOCATE 369
VOL. 78 PART 3 MAY 2020
FURTHER CONVENTIONS
A further convention was planned for 1914 in Geneva, postponed for a year
and then abandoned, rendered impossible by the butchery that followed the
opening roar of the guns of August 1914.
In 1922 a convention of the five victorious countries attempted to deal
with submarine warfare and the use of gas, but France refused to sign and
it came to nothing.
A further attempt to deal with the poison gas issue, this time successful,
occurred in 1925. This had been dealt with by the Treaty of Versailles in
1919, but additional signatories were added and the prohibition on the use
of gas was extended to bacteriological warfare. The initiative resulted in a
protocol.
THIRD GENEVA CONVENTION
It took some time to activate, but in 1929 the third Geneva Convention was
made. Profiting from the experiences of the First World War, it dealt with the
situation of prisoners of war. It was the third Geneva Convention that established
that all combatants must wear an identity token, the famous “dog
tag”, to enable the identification of the dead and wounded. It also established
the principle that no prisoner can be required to disclose any information
to his captors except name, rank, age and service number. Although
Japan had ratified the first convention, it refused to ratify the third. This
was one of its excuses for its merciless ill treatment of prisoners of war during
the Second World War.
In 1930 another stab at regulating submarine warfare succeeded in establishing
that submarines may not sink a merchant vessel without warning
and without arranging for passengers and crew to get to safety. Just permitting
them to embark in lifeboats was not good enough; rather, they had to
be allowed to get to shore or to another merchant vessel. This treaty was, as
we all know, ignored in the Second World War, though not because it was
not formally a part of the Geneva Conventions.
FOURTH GENEVA CONVENTION
The savagery of the Second World War prompted the promulgation of the
fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, the prime focus of which was the protection
of civilians. Hitherto, the conventions had dealt with combatants,
but the experience of the wholesale massacre of civilian populations
between 1939 and 1945 provoked extensive articles dealing with the treatment
of civilians in time of war. The 1949 Geneva Convention collected up,
amended and extended the three previous conventions; it also incorporated