Widening the legal lens from within IHL and beyond: “Special or ad hoc agreements” as an expandable resource for restraint
8 July 2025
Author: Aristide Evouna Evouna
In this blog, Aristide explores how special or ad hoc agreements within International Humanitarian Law (IHL) can serve as flexible tools to go beyond basic legal compliance in armed conflicts, particularly non-international ones. While IHL provides protection to civilians and protected persons, it often overlooks indirect and long-term harms to them. Special agreements, encouraged under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, allow warring parties to voluntarily adopt additional humanitarian obligations, including those from other areas of international law such as human rights, refugee, and environmental law. These agreements can be tailored to specific needs, helping address broader consequences of conflict. Notable examples, such as the initial version of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement, illustrate how such instruments can combine legal, social, political, and humanitarian commitments, making them effective tools in mitigating civilian harm and promoting compliance.
About the Beyond Compliance Blog Symposium
The Beyond Compliance Symposium has been developed within the framework of our research programme on Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors. It brings together scholars and practitioners across the humanitarian, human rights, development and security sector fields to reflect on the conceptualisation of everyday negative lived experiences of armed conflict.
Understanding the personal, material, temporal and spatial scope of (civilian) harm and (humanitarian) need, as well as the characteristics and motivations of actors experiencing, causing, and exercising protective agency in relation to harm + need, represent crucial first steps in articulating effective responses. Contributions to the symposium also include reflections on legal and extra-legal strategies to prevent, reduce and redress harm + need, including through promotion of compliance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law and efforts aimed at generating restraint from violence and abuse.
Photo credit: © Nicolás Braguinsky Cascini/Generating Respect Project.
Latest blog posts
Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with our research and activities