Dehumanising trends in Humanitarian Law: the breach of the obligation to protect medical units. Violations of IHL during the war in Ukraine
On July 8th 2024, the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv suffered an airstrike that killed at least 42 civilians, five of them children, and injured at least 190 (HRW, 2024). The hospital was hit during a wave of Russian Federation missile attacks on different cities in Ukraine (UNSC, 2024). Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has sustained at least 9,560 civilian casualties, and 21,450 more injuries, including 1,796 children (594 killed and 1202 injured) (HRW, 2024). The Russian Federation claims that it was an accident, going so far as to declare that: “claims about a deliberate Russian strike on civilian targets in Kyiv are not true. The destruction was caused by the fall of a Ukrainian air defence missile [...] If this were a Russian strike, there would have been nothing left of the building and all the children would have been killed and not wounded”, as stated in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) meeting the day after the attack (UNSC, 2024). This is one aggression in a long list of strikes on hospitals and medical facilities, which are places that enjoy a special regime of protection within International Humanitarian Law (IHL). This paper explores the norms that protect these spaces and the people inside them, aiming to shed light on a worrying trend of unlawful warfare. Firstly, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols are examined, with Article 14 of the IV Geneva Conventions as the backbone foundation upon which the legal protection is built. Secondly, an account of the prohibition of attacks on hospitals and safety zones is explored, which proposes different options in which this breach of IHL could be prosecuted. Lastly, this article briefly oversees the international community’s response to the aforementioned attack and compares it to other conflicts in which similar attacks have occurred.
