‘We can no longer pretend that what we are witnessing across war zones is in accordance with the law’

Speech given by Mirjana Spoljaric, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, at the UN Security Council Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict – 20 May 2026, New York

Mr President,

Wars fought without rules transform wars between combatants into wars against civilians.
  In recent weeks, I have undertaken several missions to the Middle East, where the impact of conflict on civilians is painfully clear. But brutal patterns of warfare are becoming pervasive across regions from the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, to eastern Europe, and beyond.
  We can no longer pretend that what we are witnessing across war zones is in accordance with the law.
  Not the scale of destruction.
  Not the scale of suffering.
  And not the language being used to justify it.
  When leaders direct their militaries to act without restraint, when they label their enemies as sub-human, when they threaten entire populations, they do more than incite war crimes.
  They threaten to destroy the moral foundations of what it means to be human.
  Across history, dehumanisation has been a consistent precursor to atrocity. Indiscriminate killing, torture and abuse become far easier to justify when we stop seeing others as equal human beings.
  But what happens ? It gives your enemy the green light to do the same.
  The real-world consequences are horrific and undeniable.
  Entire territories reduced to rubble and hospitals destroyed, patients killed. Aid workers and medics repeatedly targeted.
  These are the IHL violations that happen in plain sight.
  Others happen in the shadows, in jail cells, detention centres and interrogation rooms far from public scrutiny. In the extreme power imbalance between a person in a cell and those holding the keys, moral boundaries can easily collapse.
  In too many conflicts, people behind bars are stripped of any shred of their humanity. They are recast as less than human and therefore unworthy of fair treatment or trial. They are robbed of their identities and are at risk of vanishing, as records of their whereabouts are destroyed.
  Dehumanisation is not limited to captured combatants; civilians deprived of liberty are often subjected to similar abuses.
  Deliberate cruelty does not happen by chance. There is no such thing as accidental torture or abuse. It is the product of a system designed to rationalise acts born from a disregard of the law and military strategies designed to irreversibly destroy.
  The Geneva Conventions are clear that in international armed conflicts – including occupation – prisoners of war, civilian internees and detainees have a right to be visited by the ICRC. We monitor their treatment and conditions, keep them connected with their families and help prevent them from going missing.
  Despite states’ obligation to allow ICRC visits, our access is denied or severely restricted in far too many instances today – a dangerous erosion of the norms that risks harming not only people behind bars today, but also tomorrow.
  We continue to carry out detention visits wherever we are given access. Last week, I visited Karkh Central Prison in Baghdad, which now houses thousands of people of nearly 70 nationalities who were recently transferred from northeast Syria. Among them are children who were caught up in a war they did not choose and now face a life potentially behind bars.
  Their situation symbolizes what can happen when the international community deems entire categories of people outside the bounds of the law and lacks the political and moral courage to manage their fate.
  For many people living through war or under occupation, the feeling of imprisonment is not confined to places of detention but [extends] to daily life.
  Today, the future of millions of civilians across the world is shackled by a level of destruction that erases their homes and livelihoods, that severs them from their land, that denies them basic human dignity.
  Armed conflict does not happen in a vacuum. Where politics fail, wars follow. It is therefore time to invest genuinely in the lasting resolution of conflicts, and not only the cursory management of them.
  Mr President,
  Protecting civilians and treating your adversary within the confines of the law does not make you weaker. It strengthens your moral upper hand at home and abroad.
  The first steps towards peace are often found in the simultaneous release of prisoners or in the return of the deceased to their loved ones. These acts are far easier to carry out when parties respect the rules of war.
  This is why I urge leaders to make international humanitarian law a political priority. I am encouraged that 111 states have joined the call to be part of the Global IHL Initiative – an exceptional effort launched by Brazil, China, France, Jordan, Kazakhstan and South Africa to galvanise political commitment to international humanitarian law.
  We cannot succumb to a political culture that erases the lessons born out of world wars, out of the ashes of mass destruction and genocide.
  It is up to you, as members of the Security Council, as members of the United Nations General Assembly and as State Parties to the Geneva Conventions, to change course.
  Thank you. •

Source: www.icrc.org/en/statement/icrc-president-un-security-council-open-debate-protection-civilians-armed-conflict of 20 May 2026

Jeffrey D. Sachs: “We are led by gangsters, and with a gangster mentality”

km. On 17 June, the US and Iranian presidents signed a “memorandum” – a declaration of intent – which, in 14 points, is intended to lay the foundations for a ceasefire and further negotiations with the aim of reaching a peace agreement. No one can yet say what will come of this declaration. The public debate over who is the victor in this war is premature and unhelpful. It also shows that this debate is still taking place in “war mode”. Would it not be better for all sides to discuss whether the agreed 14 points are justified? Not from the perspective of either of the warring parties, but from the perspective of international law and the UN Charter! There is much to be said for this! To answer the question of how to assess the agreed 14 points, we must also scrutinise the role of the US in this war – again, not from the perspective of any of the warring parties, but from the perspective of the law. This is what the American economist Jeffrey D. Sachs did in a video discussion with the Norwegian journalist and professor of political science Glenn Diesen on 15 June 2026 – just a few hours after the first reports of an agreement between the governments of the US and Iran – stating, amongst other things, as follows¹:

“[…] There are no operative norms against war in the US executive branch and certainly not in Trump’s mind. So, the idea that you bomb places, kill people, assassinate people, this is a norm. There’s no sense in which any single American official would say, ‘Oh, but the UN charter doesn’t allow that.’ That statement doesn’t exist. We are led by gangsters and with a gangster mentality. ‘Do what you can, get away with what you can. Anyone else is a sucker. Don’t be stupid. There’s no international law.’ […] There’s no moral compunction, legal compunction, no need to justify other than victory itself.
  […]
  I think it’s probably the case that Trump was on a drunken high – from a delusional high, let me say – from Venezuela in which some kind of inside operation between the CIA and the Venezuelan government agreed to the removal forcibly of the president of the country. It left a regime intact, but it changed the government and it changed politics, in a way, because it was the cover for the US to remove sanctions that had been put on Venezuela beforehand and start shipping Venezuelan oil to the United States. And the Venezuelans were in a rather desperate need of cash and so they went along with this as well.
  And I think the Iranian gambit was not aiming to be a war. It was aiming to be a one-day operation. And everything we know about it tells us that story that there was a plan to install a [new] leader. Trump said as much – kill the leadership, decapitation – and everything will be all right the next day.
  This is the behaviour of very naive, very arrogant people. It does show to my mind a complete breakdown of politics in the United States. Our institutions don’t work. We don’t have institutional review. We don’t have a functioning national security council, national security apparatus. We certainly don’t have a republic in the sense of a constitutional order in which Congress would either declare war or have oversight over the actions of the executive branch or control through the budget.
  We have none of that. We have a small gangster mentality group running things right now. It didn’t work for them. They face some constraints as a result of the failure of this one-day operation. This [the memorandum] is essentially trying to find a way out. I think it’s not a surrender. It’s not a victory. It shows how useless – entirely – all of this gangsterism was and how much it hurts everyone else – us, especially the Iranian people, the 160 school girls killed on the first day of the strike in Minab. It’s been a disaster for everybody.
  The one place where it’s not been a disaster is in big tech, which has tried out its weapons and has gotten expanded Pentagon contracts for AI systems. It made a few mistakes – like mass murder of school girls – but you know that’s all in the machine learning process and the systems learning process. Palantir has won. The Israeli stock market has won. So the warmongers came out ahead. The world suffered much, much larger losses from a military, strategic and foreign policy point of view. This was not only useless; it was a loss.”

¹www.youtube.com/watch of 15 June 2026; linguistically revised