PROTECTION OF CIVILIANS IN NON-INTERNATIONAL ARMED CONFLICTS: GAPS BETWEEN TREATY LAW AND STATE PRACTICE

The overwhelming majority of armed conflicts in the contemporary world are non-international in character, waged not between States but between governmental forces and organised armed groups, or between such groups themselves, within the territory of a single State. Despite this reality, International Humanitarian Law's (IHL) treaty framework governing non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) remains considerably less developed than the detailed regulatory regime applicable to international armed conflicts. This asymmetry, rooted in the historical reluctance of States to accept external regulation of what was long regarded as an essentially domestic matter of sovereign concern, has produced a body of treaty law that, while progressively strengthened since 1949, continues to leave significant protective gaps for civilians caught within internal conflicts. This paper examines the treaty framework governing the protection of civilians in NIACs, principally Common Article 3 to the four Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II of 1977, and evaluates the persistent gaps between these treaty obligations and actual State practice, drawing on customary international law developments, judicial interpretation, and contemporary conflict examples to assess the adequacy of the existing legal architecture. The analysis proceeds in several parts, tracing the historical development of the treaty framework, examining threshold and classification difficulties, identifying substantive gaps in detention, humanitarian access, targeting, and non-State actor compliance, illustrating these gaps through contemporary conflict practice, addressing the enforcement architecture applicable to NIAC violations, and considering ongoing efforts, both legal and institutional, to narrow the divide between treaty text and lived reality before offering concluding observations.