Spain
Practice Relating to Rule 81. Restrictions on the Use of Landmines
Spain’s LOAC Manual (1996) contains the same restrictions and prohibitions on the use of mines and remotely delivered mines as in Articles 3, 4, and 5 of the 1980 Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
The manual also states:
Independent of the type of target, its location, the kind of military operation, the given mission or any other circumstances, it is prohibited to use this type of weapon [i.e.,
inter alia, mines] … wherever its location is indiscriminate … wherever it cannot be guided towards a specific military target and wherever there is reason to believe that it will cause disproportionate collateral damage.
Spain’s LOAC Manual (2007) contains the same restrictions and prohibitions on the use of mines and remotely delivered mines as in Articles 3, 4, and 5 of the 1980 Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
The manual also states: “All ‘feasible precautions’ must be taken to protect civilians from the effects of mines … ”.
In 2008, in response to a question concerning the prohibition of cluster munitions, Spain’s Secretary of State for Constitutional and Parliamentary Matters wrote:
The Spanish government is at all times supporting the measures advanced within the international community in which humanitarian considerations have primacy over the expected operational advantages that the use by the military of certain weapons, considered to cause excessive suffering to, or that have indiscriminate effects on, the civilian population, such as … anti-personnel mines, could have.