Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907

Hague Conventions Of 1899 And 1907

The Hague Conventions were two international treaties negotiated at international peace conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands: The First Hague Conference in 1899 and the Second Hague Conference in 1907. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law. A third conference was planned for 1914 and later rescheduled for 1915, but never took place due to the start of World War I. The German international law scholar and neo-Kantian pacifist Walther Schücking called the assemblies the "international union of Hague conferences". and saw them as a nucleus of an international federation that was to meet at regular intervals to administer justice and develop international law procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes, asserting "that a definite political union of the states of the world has been created with the First and Second Conferences." The various agencies created by the Conferences, like the Permanent Court of Arbitration, "are agents or organs of the union."

A major effort in both the conferences was to create a binding international court for compulsory arbitration to settle international disputes, which was considered necessary to replace the institution of war. This effort, however, failed to realize success either in 1899 or in 1907. The First Conference was generally a success and was focused on disarmament efforts. The Second Conference failed to create a binding international court for compulsory arbitration but did enlarge the machinery for voluntary arbitration, and established conventions regulating the collection of debts, rules of war, and the rights and obligations of neutrals. Along with disarmament and obligatory arbitration, both conferences included negotiations concerning the laws of war and war crimes. Many of the rules laid down at the Hague Conventions were violated in the First World War. The German invasion of Belgium, for instance, was a violation of Hague III (1907), which states that hostilities must not commence without explicit warning.

Most of the countries present, including the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, and Persia, favored a binding international arbitration, but the condition was that the vote should be unanimous, and a few countries, led by Germany, vetoed the idea.