Legal Aspects Regarding the Existence of the Internal Armed Conflict

Abstract The issue of the existence of the internal armed conflict concerns both legal factors and political factors (recognition of the existence of the internal armed conflict). From a legal point of view, to declare a violent social phenomenon as internal armed conflict, we must resort to the specific rules of international humanitarian law: Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Article 1 of the First Additional Protocol to these conventions of 1977. However, these regulations, while describing the general parameters of the existence of an internal armed conflict, do not establish clear legal criteria for delimiting the internal armed conflict of internal tensions and disturbances or other forms of non-armed conflicts. This regulatory shortcoming has led to the emergence in the jurisprudence of some states, but also in the international one, of criteria for the existence of the internal armed conflict