This statement puts all concisely, but dryly.

Andrew - would you want to have a go at re-wording it more catchilly?

Jim McCluskey has suggeste making the following addition to the Basic Statement: ... "and to elucidate the degree to which these laws are being or are not being observed."

Here's a comment from Martha Jean Baker

I also wonder if instead of war of armed conflict we talk about humanitarian law and its relationship to human rights law – there are parallels and differences that need to be understood. Humanitarian law is generally thought to be another term for law of armed conflict – the Geneva conventions and such

I thought further after looking at Jim McCluskeys' wish to identify where law is not being observed. There is an overiding natural law of might is right, although I am inserting a note of sinism; the point is as with everything you can only push authority a limited amount. They can never make there possition untenable; military persumably could never become pacifists and stay in bussiness. A politician at the present time could not easily be pacifist though in the 1920's Keir Hard's for the independant Labout Party had a pacifism in his manifesto. The point is that the statement should, I think push as far as is obtainable without becoming too marginalised.

I suspect that the Native Americans (Red Indians) still have tittle, by peace treaties signed by them, to the whole north american continent. US governement democratic system is in anycase based on the Native system of corcuses and primaries. I can't imagin that anyone would get anywhere trying to enforce any of that though. Actually I don't know what the treaties say but an awful lot of British and French soliders were killed by a compartively tiny number of native warriors until they signed the treaties and stopped fighting.