Recueil des Cours, Collected Courses, 2001
Description:... "Djamchid Momtaz, Professor at the University of Teheran, reminds us that with the end of the cold war, non-international armed conflicts of ethnic or religious origin have become widespread. These are conflicts with an enemy that is less abstract: he is known and one bears a grudge against him because he belongs to a certain social group. Nowadays, these non-international armed conflicts are true human catastrophes on an often exceptionally large scale. The suffering generated by these conflicts, so underlines Professor Momtaz, puts forward the need for developing an international humanitarian law applicable to non-international armed conflicts. Custom has proved to be more suited to bring this project to a successful conclusion than conventional law. It is the principal source of this law, explains Professor Momtaz in the first chapter of his course. The author shows that custom is an inescapable point of reference in the qualification of non-international armed conflicts and the identification of the obligations of the conflicting parties, and that the process of qualifying the violation of these obligations as a criminal act, the privileged instrument for the implementation of this law, is done exclusively by way of custom"--Publisher's description.
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