ABSTRACT
International humanitarian law is a set of rules applicable in armed conflicts, and with respect to weapons, it regulates their use, without necessarily regulating their possession, development, production or transfer. Regulating the latter activities belongs to law of disarmament and arms control, which does not necessarily involve the prohibition of their use. Concerning the international regulations of landmines, by early 1990s, it was becoming more and more evident that the instruments of international humanitarian law were not reducing or even containing the number of victims, who were mostly civilians. In order to reduce the damages caused to the civilian population by landmines, it appeared necessary to make them totally unavailable in the battlefields. It also appeared necessary to start serious demining activities in order to reduce the damage that continues to occur after the termination of armed conflicts. In short, regulations that were needed were, besides a clear rule of international humanitarian law prohibiting the use of landmines, those of disarmament
and arms control. Against this background, extensive rules of disarmament and arms control were incorporated in a treaty that set out the humanitarian rule of not to use the landmine: the Ottawa Convention on Landmines, that was adopted in 1997 and came into force in1999, is thus a hybrid treaty of international humanitarian law and disarmament.4 In the context of international humanitarian law, the Ottawa Convention is often presented simply as one of the treaties regulating the use of specific weapons,5 but that is only one aspect of this treaty. It establishes a distinct, second range of regulations, namely, disarmament and arms control regulations concerning the landmines, and therefore is a hybrid treaty.
