The past couple of years have seen a substantial number of new developments regarding the relationship between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL). These include what is probably the most significant judicial engagement ever with this relationship – the 2025 European Court of Human Rights Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia merits judgment – as well as three advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice (2024 Policies and Practices; 2025 Climate Change; 2025 UNRWA AOs). There are many notable aspects of these decisions (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here). One, however, is of particular interest: how the ECtHR and the ICJ have clearly abandoned lex specialis as the conceptual framing of the IHL/IHRL relationship.

This is, in my view, very much a good thing. What these courts have instead been doing is to apply IHL and IHRL simultaneously, while interpreting them harmoniously. Even so, it is particularly striking how three of the four cases I mentioned above do not bother engaging with the lex specialis terminology and framework at all. This is despite the fact that, in the case of the ECtHR, 26  states (as third party intervenors in the case) expressly invited the Court to do so, and despite the fact that, in the case of the ICJ, its Nuclear Weapons AO was the starting point for the whole lex specialis framing in the first place.

That said, none of these were ‘hard’ cases dealing with a genuine normative conflict between IHL and IHRL, e.g. with regard to the permissibility of killing or deprivation of liberty. This, in turn, enabled the two courts to more easily avoid addressing lex specialis. And in one case, the Climate Change AO, the ICJ did extensively discuss lex specialis (if somewhat problematically so, at para 166) in the context of the relationship between the Paris Agreement and general environmental law. The problematic aspect lies mainly in the Court’s failure to clearly distinguish between the several different meanings that the term lex specialis can have (total displacement, partial displacement, or a weaker principle of interpretation – I will not elaborate on these here, but see more at the end of the post).

However, that these courts have abandoned lex specialis as the framework for understanding the relationship between IHL and IHRL does not mean that states have done so – even if, again, states initially embraced it precisely due to the ICJ. The fact that 26 states wanted the ECtHR to use lex specialis (in some form) cannot just be disregarded. Even more interestingly, in July the UN Human Rights Council adopted (without a vote) two resolutions which expressly refer to lex specialis. Unless I am mistaken, this is the first time the Council has done so, after some 18 years in which it avoided using this terminology.

The first resolution was adopted on 6 July 2026, 62/4, Human rights implications of the obstruction and denial of humanitarian access and threats to the safety of humanitarian personnel in armed conflict, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/62/4. The first preambular paragraph on the second page reads as follows:

Acknowledging that international human rights law and international humanitarian law are complementary and mutually reinforcing, that all human rights require protection equally and that the protection provided by human rights law continues in situations of armed conflict, including foreign occupation, taking into account when international humanitarian law applies as lex specialis

The original draft of this resolution was submitted by Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Pakistan and United Arab Emirates (A/HRC/62/L.25). In that draft, the paragraph above was identical, except that it said that IHRL and IHL are ‘distinct, complementary and mutually reinforcing…’ – the word ‘distinct’ was dropped from the final text.

The second resolution was adopted on 7 July 2026, 62/20 Protection of healthcare in armed conflict, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/62/20. The fourth preambular paragraph of this resolution reads as follows:

Recognizing that international human rights law and international humanitarian law are complementary and mutually reinforcing, and considering that all human rights require protection equally and that the protection provided by international human rights law continues in situations of armed conflict, including situations of occupation, taking into account when international humanitarian law applies as lex specialis

Some minor linguistic differences aside, the substance of this paragraph is the same as the one in resolution 62/4. But here, though, there is a much greater difference compared to the original draft, which was submitted by Bahrain, Kuwait, Pakistan and Qatar (A/HRC/62/L.26), where that paragraph read as follows:

Recognizing that international human rights law and international humanitarian law are complementary and mutually reinforcing and that international humanitarian law applies as lex specialis governing situations of armed conflict

This was clearly a more emphatic use of lex specialis (e.g. ‘governing’ as opposed to ‘taking into account’). Note that these drafts were not written by Western states that are usually regarded as the biggest proponents of the Latin formula; on the contrary, it is likely that some Western states helped tone down the language somewhat. (Any input from colleagues familiar with the actual negotiations would be gratefully received.)

That said, it is clear that the Human Rights Council, by consensus, endorsed the use of the lex specialis maxim for the purpose of managing the IHL/IHRL context, even if it is unclear what that means exactly. And unless I’m wrong (i.e. unless the search functions of UN ODS and the digital library failed me), the Council has never used the lex specialis terminology before, except once, in its very early days. This was in resolution 9/9 (2008), Protection of the human rights of civilians in armed conflict, which in its preamble states that the Council is:

Considering that all human rights require protection equally and that the protection provided by human rights law continues in armed conflict situations, taking into account when international humanitarian law applies as a lex specialis

Note that this is the clear origin of the language that ended up in the two 2026 resolutions (the same applies to the complementary and mutually reinforcing language, which is from a different paragraph). And all of this is inherited from the text of a resolution adopted by the Council’s predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, in 2005, which itself likely drew upon sources such as the ICJ Wall AO and the Human Rights Committee General Comment No 31, as well as a working paper by Françoise Hampson and Ibrahim Salama.

So, that the Council in 2026 repeated the language it had used back in 2008, which was itself inherited from the Commission, is more likely by happenstance than due to some concerted effort (although there clearly was an effort to ensure consistency).  But again, I don’t think the Council’s endorsement of lex specialis can simply be ignored. I would personally prefer to read it as an endorsement of the third, unobjectionable, interpretative variant of lex specialis – which is that IHL can be taken into account when interpreting more general IHRL standards. What this does not entail, however, is the proposition that IHL displaces IHRL, totally or partially, or that compliance with IHL will always mean that IHRL has also been complied with.

Which brings me to a second interesting development – the decision of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to start drafting a new general comment on the application of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in armed conflict. While other treaty bodies have commented on the application of human rights during armed conflict, none have produced a dedicated general comment looking at the application of the whole treaty within their competence in such a situation.

Earlier this year CESCR published a call for inputs, which has generated a substantial response from states, NGOs and scholars. There are so many of these that I confess to only reading a couple, including one by my Reading colleagues Alison Bisset and Naomi Lott, and another by Bristol colleagues Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne and Jasmin Johurun Nessa (both of which I very much recommend).

I also made a submission, in which I argue, inter alia, that the Committee should avoid using lex specialis, and that it should also embrace the opportunity to explain that socio-economic rights can be violated in armed conflict even if IHL was not violated. IHRL – and socio-economic rights in particular – can be the framework for a big-picture, macro analysis of the aggregate harms that the military operations of a state have inflicted on a civilian population, something that IHL is not as capable of doing as IHRL.

Thus, for example, when we assess Israel’s military operations in Gaza and their impact on the population’s enjoyment of the right to health, we could do so bottom-up, by looking at whether individual Israeli attacks on hospitals or ambulances complied with the targeting rules of IHL, or at whether specific Israeli decisions to deny access to humanitarian relief or certain goods complied with IHL. These individual decisions and acts can then form a pattern of behaviour, which can inform how we assess the whole thing. But we do not have to do so. There is an equally valid alternative: to conduct a primarily IHRL-oriented, top-down, overarching assessment of the cumulative impact that Israeli operations have had on Gazans’ right to health (and other rights), balancing the harms that were inflicted, those that could have been avoided, and those that Israel was trying to prevent.

The Human Rights Council’s new resolution 62/20 to my mind very much support this line of thinking. Thus, in its operative part, the Council:

2. Also affirms that the obligation of States, under international human rights law, as applicable, to respect, protect and fulfil the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health in armed conflict, including situations of occupation, includes reducing the causes of ill health and ensuring, without discrimination, the availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of healthcare and addressing the underlying determinants of health, including safe drinking water and sanitation, adequate food and housing, education, work and a clean, healthy and sustainable environment;
3. Recognizes that the right to life also contains the obligation of States to take positive measures, which include measures to ensure equal access to healthcare, especially in life-threatening circumstances;
4. Strongly condemns all acts that constitute violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law, as applicable, with regard to the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health during armed conflict, which may include the destruction or severe degradation of healthcare systems, the obstruction or restriction of or the limiting of access to medical facilities, goods and services, including medical supplies, equipment and essential services that enable their functioning, direct attacks on medical personnel, facilities and transport, as well as on the wounded and sick, the criminalization of the provision of healthcare and the obstruction of access to healthcare.

To my mind, one can easily argue that Israel did not do everything it could have done to (say) reduce the causes of ill-health or to ensure the availability of the determinants of health (including food, water, housing) in Gaza, and that its destructive operations severely degraded Gaza’s healthcare system, without having to examine attack-by-attack whether the IHL principles of precaution, distinction and proportionality were respected. Note in particular how the fourth paragraph speaks of violations of IHL or IHRL – this clearly implies that IHRL can be violated in armed conflict even in the absence of an IHL violation, i.e. that establishing the latter is not a prerequisite for the former.

I’ve expanded on these arguments (and much more, including an extended look at the four cases mentioned up top) in a new article, ‘The Relationship Between International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law: Reflections on Key Recent Cases and the Road Ahead,’ forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law. The abstract is below, and comments are very welcome.

The relationship between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) has long divided experts into two camps: those who treat IHL as the exclusive normative framework for armed conflict, and those who maintain that human rights treaties continue to apply in war alongside IHL. This article revisits that debate in light of a remarkable cluster of recent decisions: the European Court of Human Rights’ 2025 Grand Chamber merits judgment in Ukraine and the Netherlands v Russia, and the International Court of Justice’s 2024 Palestine, 2025 Climate Change, and 2025 UNRWA advisory opinions. Two principal arguments emerge. First, lex specialis has experienced near-total judicial abandonment in the IHL/IHRL context; both courts have embraced harmonious interpretation and systemic integration while deliberately avoiding the Latin formula, even when expressly invited to use it. However, the hardest cases – genuine norm conflicts in the conduct of hostilities, especially regarding deprivation of life under Article 2 ECHR and the role of derogation – remain open. Second, the recent jurisprudence demonstrates the substantial gap-filling role IHRL can play where IHL is sparse or silent, particularly in relation to digital rights, socio-economic rights, and a state’s treatment of its own population. The article further argues that IHRL enables a top-down, strategic assessment of the cumulative civilian harm caused by military operations, an inquiry that IHL’s atomized, attack-by-attack focus cannot easily undertake.