Geneva Protocol
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The 1925 Geneva Protocol
The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare was signed in Geneva on 17 June 1925 and it entered into force on 8 February 1928. As of 1 January 2008, the Geneva Protocol has 135 contracting parties.
This international agreement is the first document that makes explicit reference to microbial forms of warfare. Earlier formal constraints were impossible because the causes of disease and the methods of its propagation were poorly understood. Nevertheless, legal treatises from the 19th century and earlier indicate that certain types of biological warfare agents were subsumed under the term ‘poison’. Therefore, early customary prohibitions on the use of poison also applied to certain primitive modes of biological warfare (which mostly consisted of polluting the environment, e.g., by dumping carcasses into wells, or the treatment of kinetic weapons with toxins or concoctions of putrefied organic materials). The Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to both the 1899 Hague Convention (II) with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land and the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land later codified this ban. In its judgment of 30 September 1946, the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal declared that the rules embodied in the 1907 Hague Convention ‘were recognised by all civilised nations and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war.’ As a result, it is possible to convincingly argue that any state is restricted in its options to apply disease and toxins as a means of warfare.
The Geneva Protocol also belongs to the laws of war, which restrict the use in combat of certain types of weapons or modes of warfare that are deemed to be inhumane. The document, however, does not prohibit the preparation for chemical or biological warfare. After its entry into force in 1928 states continued their chemical research and development programmes, stockpiled chemical munitions and trained their military forces in the offensive use of these weapons. Prompted by the growing understanding of disease and its propagation and several false allegations of biological weapon (BW) programmes and tests, several states—including France, the United Kingdom, Japan and the Soviet Union—also initiated offensive BW research and development programmes in the late 1920s and 1930s. Some of those programmes continued after the Second World War. Other states—including the United States—started up their BW programmes during the Second World War. (Japan and the United States did not become party to the Geneva Protocol until respectively 1970 and 1975.)
Forty-five parties adopted reservations declaring their explicit right to retaliation in kind if an enemy or its allies resort to chemical and biological weapons (CBW) first. Presently many of these states have or are in the process of withdrawing them in order to fully conform their commitment to the Geneva Protocol with their obligations under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
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The English and French versions are equally authentic.
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