International Law of Belligerent Occupation

This chapter examines the Court’s decisions on the applicability of the belligerent law of occupation to the Occupied Territories and the enforcement of that body of law by the Court. It explains the distinction the Court has drawn between customary international law and treaty law. The chapter shows that the Court regards the Hague Regulations as customary law but has not taken the same approach to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Government of Israel adopted the view that the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the West Bank is questionable, but undertook to respect the Convention’s humanitarian provisions. The chapter shows how the Court has neither accepted nor rejected the government’s view and has left the Convention’s formal applicability as an open question. Nevertheless the Court regularly relies on the Convention and interprets is provisions. The chapter maintains that in interpreting the Convention the Court has vacillated between different theories of interpretation but has consistently adopted the interpretation that favours the government’s position in the particular cases before it.