All the ICRC’s international humanitarian law databases are now searchable via a single interface.
IHL research can be daunting; the ever-increasing amount of data makes it difficult to navigate and consolidate information without the use of sophisticated indexes or search engines.
With this in mind, the ICRC has now made it possible to search across our international humanitarian law databases via one common interface.
For instance, you can search the national legislation of one or more States in the Customary IHL database alone, or in both the Customary IHL database and the National Implementation database.
You can then refine the list of results by topic or document type.
For help, please refer to the Search tips.
We hope that this tool will be of great help to all IHL practitioners and researchers and to more occasional users, such as journalists.
The ICRC international humanitarian law databases
The Treaties, States Parties and Commentaries database contains the text of IHL treaties and related documents and lists the States that have signed and/or ratified or acceded to the treaties, with any reservations or declarations. It also contains the original commentaries to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, plus the updated Commentaries.
The Customary IHL database contains the 161 rules of customary IHL identified in the ICRC’s 2005 Study on Customary IHL and the complete collection of practice underlying that study. It also presents regular updates of this collection of practice, making available new State practice in the field of IHL together with such international material such as judgments handed down by international courts and tribunals.
The National implementation database contains statutes and case law that implement IHL treaties and other related international instruments, and illustrates possible approaches to incorporating IHL in national legal and administrative frameworks. The database is organized by State and by Topic, and most of the documents in the database include a summary to facilitate their consultation.