ABSTRACT
Reciprocity plays a significant part in influencing the behaviour of parties to an armed conflict and has had a prominent role in the creation, enforcement and indeed breach of the law of armed conflict. There is little doubt that parties to a conflict are motivated to respect the law by the belief that, for example, treating captured enemy combatants and civilians humanely will lead to similar treatment by one’s opponents. Conversely, a failure by one side to respect the law of armed conflict is likely to be met in practice by a similar disregard for the rules. It is not uncommon for parties to an armed conflict to claim that their opponents do not respect the laws of armed conflict and that accordingly they should not be bound by those same laws. It has been said that the parties to the conflict in the Former Yugoslavia ‘plead reciprocity with almost pathological insistence in seeking to justify the gravest breaches of international humanitarian law’.1 Conflicts involving non-state actors, particularly those under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’, have been especially prone to claims that states involved in such conflicts should not be bound to apply the law of armed conflict given the disregard for groups such as al-Qaeda for the law.2
