The Hague Conventions: Charting the Rules for Uncivilized War

The Hague Conventions are a series of international treaties and declarations that emerged from two monumental peace conferences held in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1899 and 1907. They represent one of history's most ambitious and paradoxical projects: the attempt to codify the laws of war, or jus in bello. At their core, these conventions are not about preventing war, but about regulating its conduct once it has begun. They are a formal, international consensus on what constitutes “civilized” behavior in the midst of humanity's most savage activity. The agreements established binding rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, the protection of civilians and cultural property, and the restriction or outright banning of certain “unnecessarily cruel” weapons and tactics, from expanding bullets to the use of poison gas. More than just a list of prohibitions, the Hague Conventions also gave birth to the world's first global institution for dispute resolution, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, laying the foundational stone for the 20th-century architecture of international justice. They are a monument to a specific moment in time—the twilight of the Belle Époque—when great powers believed, with a fragile optimism, that reason and law could impose limits upon the battlefield.

Before The Hague, the laws of war were a scattered mosaic of custom, military tradition, and the philosophical musings of scholars. For centuries, conflict was governed by unwritten codes of honor among aristocrats, religious edicts, or the brutal pragmatism of commanders. But the 19th century, an age of furious industrial and social transformation, changed the very nature of armed conflict. The Industrial Revolution did not just build factories and railways; it forged a new, terrifyingly efficient machinery of death. The citizen-soldier, conscripted by the newly powerful nation-state, replaced the professional mercenary, swelling armies to unprecedented sizes. The consequences of this new reality were etched into the landscape of battlefields across the world. At the Battle of Solferino in 1859, a Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant witnessed 40,000 men killed or wounded in a single day, their bodies left to suffer without organized medical care. His horror gave birth to a revolutionary idea: a neutral organization dedicated to alleviating the suffering of war. This seed of an idea would blossom into the Red Cross and lead directly to the First Geneva Conventions in 1864, which focused narrowly on the protection of wounded soldiers and medical personnel. It was a pinprick of light in the darkness, a first, tentative step toward codifying humanity in warfare. Across the Atlantic, the American Civil War became a grim laboratory for modern industrial warfare. The conflict saw the use of repeating rifles, ironclad warships, and trench systems that foreshadowed the horrors of World War I. Faced with a brutal war of attrition, President Abraham Lincoln commissioned a legal scholar named Francis Lieber to draft a set of rules for the Union Army. The result, General Orders No. 100, known as the Lieber Code, was the first comprehensive attempt by a modern nation to codify the laws of war. It detailed everything from the treatment of prisoners and spies to the definition of military necessity and the prohibition of “wanton cruelty.” The Lieber Code was a purely domestic document, but its principles echoed across the world, proving that a legal framework for war was not just possible, but necessary. These two streams—the humanitarianism of the Geneva Conventions and the legal pragmatism of the Lieber Code—flowed into the fertile intellectual ground of the late 19th century. Yet, they were not enough to stem the tide. A second industrial revolution was now arming the great empires of Europe with ever more sophisticated weapons: smokeless powder, which made rifles more accurate and deadly; machine guns that could scythe down infantry in moments; and massive steel battleships, the Armoured Cruiser and later the Dreadnought, which turned navies into colossal instruments of national power. An unchecked arms race was underway, a frantic dance of technological one-upmanship that was draining national treasuries and filling the air with the nervous tension of impending conflict. It was in this atmosphere of burgeoning power and profound anxiety that a most unlikely peacemaker stepped onto the world stage.

In August 1898, the foreign diplomats of St. Petersburg were summoned to receive a stunning communiqué from Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The young, enigmatic ruler, leader of Europe's most autocratic and seemingly militaristic empire, was calling for a global conference. The goal? Not to wage war, but to discuss its limitation. The Tsar's rescript spoke in lofty, idealistic tones of the “calamities which threaten the whole world” and the need to seek “a means of putting an end to the incessant armaments.” The world was skeptical, and with good reason. Why would the master of the vast Russian army suddenly advocate for peace and disarmament? Cynics saw a purely strategic motive. Russia's industrial base was lagging behind that of Germany and Britain; its military was struggling to keep pace with the latest artillery and naval technology. A freeze on armaments, they argued, was not a plea for peace but a desperate attempt to buy time, a strategic pause masquerading as a humanitarian gesture. Yet, there was also a genuine current of idealism, perhaps from the Tsar himself, influenced by his mother and by intellectual currents of pacifism and internationalism that swirled through European society. Whatever the motivation, the invitation was accepted. The neutral, famously peaceful Netherlands was chosen as the host, and its seaside capital, The Hague, would lend its name to the historic undertaking. In May 1899, delegates from 26 nations, representing the great powers of Europe, the Americas, and Asia, gathered in the Huis ten Bosch palace. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Gilded Age opulence and sober diplomacy. The delegates were a who's who of international politics—seasoned ambassadors, high-ranking military officers, and distinguished legal scholars. They were realists, men who understood power, and few arrived with any grand illusions of abolishing war. The initial, ambitious goal of disarmament was quickly and quietly shelved. The great powers, particularly a confident and ascendant Germany, had no intention of limiting their military might. The Conference, therefore, pivoted to its second, more achievable goal: regulating the conduct of war. Here, in the realm of jus in bello, history was made. The delegates broke into committees and, over three months of intense negotiation, hammered out a series of groundbreaking agreements.

The centerpiece of the 1899 Conference was the “Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land.” This was the direct intellectual heir of the Lieber Code, but now elevated to the level of binding international law. It was an astonishingly detailed document, a veritable handbook for civilized warfare. Its articles laid out, for the first time in a multilateral treaty, a clear framework for military conduct:

• The Status of Belligerents: It defined who could be considered a lawful combatant, entitled to the protections of a prisoner of war. This was crucial for distinguishing soldiers from spies or civilian partisans.
• Treatment of Prisoners: The Convention mandated humane treatment for prisoners of war. They were to be protected from violence and insults, provided with food and lodging comparable to that of their captors, and allowed to keep their personal belongings.
• Methods of Warfare: It enshrined the core principle that “the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.” It explicitly forbade killing or wounding an enemy who had surrendered, declaring that no quarter be given, and the misuse of flags of truce or enemy uniforms.
• Sieges and Bombardments: The rules stipulated that undefended towns could not be attacked. In sieges, steps had to be taken to spare, as far as possible, “buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected.” This was the embryonic form of what would later become the robust international protection of cultural property.

Perhaps the most vivid and culturally resonant work of the conference was its effort to ban specific weapons deemed to be “of a nature to cause superfluous injury.” The delegates, many of them military men, engaged in surprisingly technical and philosophical debates about the nature of suffering on the battlefield. Three declarations emerged from these discussions, each targeting a new and frightening product of military technology.

• The Dum-Dum Bullet Ban: The first declaration prohibited the use of “bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body.” Named after the British arsenal at Dum Dum, near Calcutta, where they were first produced, these bullets were designed with a soft or hollow point. Upon impact, they would mushroom, creating horrific, untreatable wounds and immense internal damage. While military powers argued they were effective for “stopping” charging colonial subjects, the delegates at The Hague saw them as a violation of the principle of proportionality—their purpose was not merely to incapacitate an enemy soldier, but to maim him barbarously. The ban on expanding bullets remains a cornerstone of international humanitarian law today.
• The Asphyxiating Gas Ban: The second declaration, with almost prophetic foresight, banned the use of projectiles “the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” At the time, large-scale chemical warfare was still the stuff of science fiction. But chemists had already demonstrated the lethal potential of gases like chlorine and phosgene. The delegates, imagining clouds of invisible poison drifting over trenches, recoiled from the prospect. The ban was a preemptive strike against a technology that was seen as indiscriminate, cruel, and a terrifying perversion of scientific progress.
• The Aerial Bombardment Ban: The final declaration prohibited, for a period of five years, “the discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons, or by other new methods of a similar nature.” The Hot Air Balloon had been used for military reconnaissance for over a century, but the idea of dropping bombs from the sky on unsuspecting soldiers or civilians below was a new and unsettling prospect. This ban was the world's first, albeit temporary, attempt at arms control for air warfare, a recognition that the third dimension of the battlefield needed its own set of rules.

Beyond regulating the battlefield, the 1899 Conference achieved something perhaps even more profound. It created the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). This was not a court in the modern sense, with permanent judges and compulsory jurisdiction. Rather, it was a permanent framework—a registry of qualified international jurists and a set of procedural rules—that nations could voluntarily use to settle their disputes through binding arbitration instead of war. The PCA was a triumph of diplomacy. It provided a face-saving “off-ramp” for nations teetering on the brink of conflict. By establishing a permanent, respected institution housed in a magnificent purpose-built “Peace Palace” in The Hague (funded by the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie), the delegates gave the abstract concept of peaceful dispute resolution a physical home and a tangible reality. It was a monumental step, the very first global institution dedicated to preserving peace.

The world did not stop spinning after 1899. In the years that followed, the very powers that had pledged to limit war engaged in brutal conflicts that tested the new rules. The British fought the Boer War in South Africa, and, most significantly, Russia and Japan fought a cataclysmic war in 1904-05. The Russo-Japanese War was a terrifying preview of the 20th century. It was a fully industrialized conflict featuring machine guns, long-range artillery, trench warfare, and a titanic clash of modern steel navies. It demonstrated both the relevance and the limitations of the 1899 Conventions. These experiences, combined with the ever-accelerating arms race, provided the impetus for a second conference, which convened in The Hague in 1907. This time, 44 nations were present, a testament to the growing acceptance of the “Hague idea.” The 1907 Conference was larger, longer, and in many ways more complex than its predecessor. Its primary goal was to revise and expand upon the 1899 agreements, incorporating the hard-won lessons of recent wars. The focus shifted significantly toward naval warfare, a domain largely untouched in 1899. The rise of the Dreadnought, a new class of battleship that rendered all previous warships obsolete overnight, had thrown naval strategy into a frenzy. The delegates grappled with a host of thorny maritime issues:

• Naval Mines: How could the use of automatic submarine contact mines—“the assassin of the sea”—be regulated to protect neutral shipping?
• Bombardment by Naval Forces: What were the rules for shelling coastal towns? Could an undefended city be bombarded?
• Rights of Neutral Powers: What rights and obligations did neutral countries have when belligerent warships entered their ports?
• Conversion of Merchant Ships: Under what conditions could a civilian merchant vessel be legally converted into a warship on the high seas?

The resulting conventions on naval warfare were detailed and technical, a reflection of the immense economic and strategic importance of sea power. The conference also refined and expanded the 1899 Convention on Land Warfare, solidifying its status as the definitive text on the subject. Yet, for all its technical successes, a shadow of failure hung over the 1907 Conference. The delegates once again failed to make any progress on arms limitation. More ominously, the crucial proposal to make arbitration through the PCA compulsory for certain types of international disputes was defeated, largely by Germany and its allies, who were unwilling to submit their sovereign right to wage war to any international body. The spirit of optimism that had flickered in 1899 was fading. The delegates departed from The Hague in the autumn of 1907 having built a more elaborate house of international law, but they could all see the storm clouds of a great war gathering on the horizon.

In August 1914, the storm broke. The First World War was the ultimate, tragic test of the Hague Conventions, and in many respects, they were found wanting. The “civilized” rules painstakingly negotiated in a gilded palace seemed a flimsy shield against the industrial slaughter of the trenches. The war saw the systematic violation of many of the Conventions' core principles. Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium was a flagrant breach of international law. The introduction of Poison Gas on a massive scale, starting at Ypres in 1915, made a mockery of the 1899 declaration. The very nature of the conflict—a “total war” that blurred the lines between combatant and civilian—ran counter to the Hague's fundamental distinction. Unrestricted Submarine warfare, aerial bombing of cities, and the sheer, unprecedented scale of the killing seemed to prove that in a fight for national survival, law was powerless. And yet, the Hague Conventions were not entirely erased. Their existence, even in breach, provided a crucial frame of reference.

• Prisoners of War: While conditions were often horrific, the principle of treating prisoners of war according to a set of rules largely held. Millions of prisoners were captured on both sides, and the framework of the Conventions, often facilitated by the Red Cross, governed their registration, housing, and eventual repatriation. This stood in stark contrast to the wars of previous centuries.
• Propaganda and Legitimacy: Both sides used alleged violations of the Hague Conventions—the “Rape of Belgium,” the sinking of the Lusitania, the use of “barbaric” weapons—as powerful tools of propaganda. This, paradoxically, reinforced the idea that a standard of conduct existed and that violating it required justification or condemnation. The law had created a baseline for moral judgment.
• The Seeds of Accountability: After the war, the Treaty of Versailles included provisions for the trial of the German Kaiser for a “supreme offence against international morality” and other German officials for “violations of the laws and customs of war.” While these trials were largely a failure, they planted a critical seed: the idea that individuals, not just states, could be held criminally responsible for their actions in wartime. This was a direct extension of the Hague philosophy.

This seed came to fruition after the even greater horrors of the Second World War. The Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, established to prosecute Nazi and Japanese leaders, built directly upon the legal foundations laid at The Hague. The charge of “war crimes” was defined by referencing the rules of land warfare codified in the Hague Conventions. The dream of the 1899 and 1907 delegates—to create a universally accepted legal standard for the conduct of war—found its ultimate, if belated, vindication in the Nuremberg courtroom. The law had finally grown teeth.

In the decades following World War II, the direct legacy of the Hague Conventions was partially absorbed by a new and expanded set of treaties: the Geneva Conventions of 1949. While the “Hague Law” traditionally focused on the methods and means of warfare, the “Geneva Law” focused on the protection of persons—the wounded, prisoners, and especially civilians. The two streams of law, born half a century apart, merged to form the bedrock of modern international humanitarian law. But the spirit of The Hague continued to inspire new efforts to regulate the ever-evolving technology of war. The Hague's pioneering work in banning specific weapons created a powerful precedent. This led to a series of major 20th and 21st-century treaties targeting weapons of mass destruction and those deemed excessively cruel:

• The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict: A direct response to the widespread destruction of art and heritage in WWII, fulfilling the vision first articulated in 1899.
• The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention: These treaties finally created robust, verifiable prohibitions on the very weapons the 1899 delegates had feared with such foresight.
• The 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.
• The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Most significantly, the idea of a permanent forum for international justice, born with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, reached its full expression in 2002 with the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), also located in The Hague. The ICC embodies the principle of individual criminal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, turning the post-war precedent of Nuremberg into a permanent, global institution. The “City of Peace and Justice” had become the world capital for international law. Today, the original Hague Conventions face challenges their creators could never have imagined. How do the rules of land warfare apply to asymmetric conflicts against non-state actors like terrorist groups? How can the principles of distinction and proportionality be applied to cyber warfare or to autonomous weapons systems (“killer robots”) that operate without direct human control? These are the questions that military lawyers and ethicists now debate, stretching and reinterpreting the century-old principles of The Hague for a new technological age. The story of the Hague Conventions is thus a story of noble ambition and tragic failure, of prophetic foresight and human folly. They were born from a late 19th-century faith in progress and reason, a belief that even the demon of war could be bound by the chains of law. That faith was shattered in the trenches of the Somme and the ashes of Hiroshima. But the principles the Conventions established—that the power to kill is not unlimited, that human dignity persists even on the battlefield, and that justice must follow atrocity—have endured. They remain a fragile but essential testament to humanity's unending struggle to impose its better angels upon its darkest instincts, a legal and moral compass for navigating the grim landscape of war.