Italy
Practice Relating to Rule 106. Conditions for Prisoner-of-War Status
Italy’s IHL Manual (1991) states:
In order to obtain the best possible protection of the civilian population, lawful combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves from the civilian population when they participate in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack.
Italy’s LOAC Elementary Rules Manual (1991) states that combatants, members of the armed forces, “distinguish themselves by their uniform or by a recognizable distinctive sign or at least by carrying their arms openly”.
At the CDDH, Italy stated that Article 42(3) of the draft Additional Protocol I (now Article 44(3)) “embodied and reaffirmed without amendment or derogation a basic rule of existing international law, the need for combatants to distinguish themselves from the civilian population”. It added that “it was essential that the distinction principle should remain the basis of international humanitarian law, because on respect for that principle depended the protection of the civilian population”.
Italy’s IHL Manual (1991) states that participants in a
levée en masse are considered combatants provided they “carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war”.
Italy’s IHL Manual (1991) states:
In order to promote the protection of the civilian population from the effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves from the civilian population while they are engaged in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack. Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:
(a) during each military engagement, and
(b) during such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.
At the CDDH, Italy abstained in the vote on Article 42 of the draft Additional Protocol I (now Article 44) “essentially because of the ambiguity of paragraphs 3 and 4 of Article 42”, but considered that “the article was not unacceptable in itself if its true meaning … could be detected”.
Italy further stated that the particular situations to which the second sentence of the third paragraph referred “were evidently those which occurred in occupied territory or in other identical situations so far as substance was concerned, that was to say where resistance movements were organized”.
Upon ratification of the 1977 Additional Protocol I, Italy stated:
The situation described in the second sentence of paragraph 3 of Article 44 can exist only in occupied territory.
The word deployment in paragraph 3 (b) means any movement towards a place from which an attack is to be launched.