UN, the European Union and America's State Department, see things differently, talking of violations of the Geneva Convention and a potential humanitarian crisis.
So perhaps the conference is designed to come up with some new international measures to combat cybercrime or a new Geneva convention to agree some rules of engagement for cyber war fare?
Now, the Obama administration is making the case that a part of the Geneva Convention that the US has never ratified should be accepted in the United States.
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Foreign Office Parliamentary Secretary Ben Bradshaw told MPs he was confident the prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Convention but that the definition of a prisoner of war was an "extremely complicated matter".
During the 1988 trial of Mutula Shakur, a self-described soldier for the "Republic of Afrika" accused by the United States government of murdering police and robbery in New York, the defense argued that Shakur was immune from prosecution on the grounds that, pursuant to the terms of Protocol I to the Geneva Convention, he should be treated as a prisoner of war.
The core purpose of the Geneva Convention is to encourage the conduct of war in a way that minimizes violence to civilians.
The Mission also recommended that the Assembly ask the Swiss Government to convene a conference of the high contracting parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on measures to enforce the Convention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and ensure its respect in accordance with its article 1.
According to the Third Geneva Convention itself (the one covering POWs), for a person to qualify as a POW and be accorded the treatment proscribed in said convention, that person must be affiliated (either regular army or militia meaning some sort of uniform) with a "High Contracting Power" (a state that was party to the convention but for argument's sake we'll say any state).
On Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. officials consider them unlawful combatants with no rights under the Geneva Convention -- but he said they would be treated in a manner "reasonably consistent" with those accords.
Chief among them, according to a senior administration official, are "legal issues covered by the Geneva convention" -- including the issue of whether the two men want to be released to the Yugoslav government.
The Committee would be well advised to heed Mr. Feith's advice that emphasis should be placed upon fixing the existing Geneva convention rather than exacerbating its present shortcomings -- namely its unenforceability -- with a new treaty that will be neither verifiable, nor effective nor enforceable.
Frequently terrorists (as they've been trained to do) and their supporters such as Amnesty will cry that America is violating the Geneva Convention by holding these men in "inhumane" conditions (which has proven to be a false allegation) without charging them and so on.
Frail hopes rest on a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in Geneva next month, at which America may perhaps argue for a ban on trade in endangered species where tigers are not protected.
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This poses a bit of a legal issue for terrorism and its supporters as terrorists neither wear uniforms nor are affiliated with a "High Contracting Power" (Osama bin Laden's signature is curiously missing from any Geneva Convention).
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