3 Moreover, as the global human rights movement grew in the last quarter of the 20th century, so did its embrace of documentation and advocacy to end impunity for violations of international humanitarian law. While this initial effort to ground international humanitarian law in human rights was largely squelched, as David Luban has shown, human rights ideas came to influence interpretations of the laws of armed conflict. 2 The new conventions only recognized a handful of rights, such as freedoms of religion and not to be tortured or be subjected to human experimentation. For political and institutional reasons, though, the drafters of the 1949 Conventions rejected that approach. In the two decades leading up to the 1949 conference on new Geneva Conventions, some international humanitarian law experts sought to introduce human rights concepts, especially human dignity, into the Conventions. It a far more limited concept than ideas of human dignity that ground the UDHR and the conventions that followed. Traditionally, the responsibilities of belligerents not to harm people not engaged in combat were grounded in the principle of humanity, to avoid unnecessary suffering. Over time, human rights ideas made their way into the law of armed conflict. 1 The consequence of that peacetime focus, though, led to almost 60 years of neglect of the right to health in armed conflict. Indeed, part of the push for addressing human rights in the UN Charter was the belief that respect for human dignity in peacetime was being neglected. The lack of attention is not surprising given that in the post-World War II period the conduct of war was the subject of the 1945 Nuremberg Declaration about war crimes and crimes against humanity, and intense debate in the lead-up to the re-drafting of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes no reference to war except to assert that respect for human rights is a means of preventing it.
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