The Interaction Between Human Rights and Humanitarian Law: Convergence, Fragmentation, Conflict, or Parallelism?

Human rights and humanitarian laws are two different bodies of rules with the same reasons of ensuring personal liberty, freedom from torture and arbitrary killings among many other things. These two laws are made to stop acts that violate the rules in them. These bodies of rules carry with them the power to inflict sanctions on their violators.Human rights and humanitarian laws cannot be said to be in fragmentation or conflict. Neither could they be said to be in parallelisms. Rather, both body of rules work together in convergence. Merriam-Webster¿s 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines convergence as, ¿the act of converging and especially moving toward union and uniformity¿. Humanitarian laws functions mainly during the time of armed conflicts while human rights laws function both in the time of peace and armed conflict. Both municipal and international laws have been made to cover human rights and humanitarian rules. There are situations where both human rights and humanitarian laws are applicable, and therefore interact in convergence.