International humanitarian law

The question that arises in the field of application of international humanitarian law is whether it is possible to regulate war by law. The idea seems paradoxical, because war evokes a state of lawlessness in which force is the law, whereas the purpose of humanitarian law is to ensure the protection and assistance of the human person in times of war. However, the four Geneva conventions of 1949 and the two additional protocols of 1977 are confronted in practice with the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of States. Also, the politicization of the recourse to the International Criminal Court to raise the individual responsibility of the perpetrators of international crimes, risks to remove from the humanitarian its legal character and to plunge it into the stakes of politics.