Whacking Unarmed Women : Gaps in the Law of Armed Conflict

In this article, Michael Noone explains that there is a gap in the law of armed conflict with respect to what soldiers may justly do with respect to unarmed female belligerents. He illustrates this gap by discussing two examples: one in which a British soldier in Northern Ireland was shot when he disarmed himself after being mobbed by a group of unarmed women, and another in which Somalian soldiers shot and killed an unarmed women who aided the killing of wounded individuals by members of a Somalian clan by pointing at their location. Noone argues that dealing with this gap is important because, as these examples suggest, it is not always the case that armed conflict is between two belligerent armies who could properly be characterized as ‘combatants’ under the international law of armed conflict.