New Zealand
Practice Relating to Rule 11. Indiscriminate Attacks
New Zealand’s Military Manual (1992) provides: “Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.”
The manual also states that “launching an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects in the knowledge that such attack will cause excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects” constitutes a grave breach.
New Zealand’s Geneva Conventions Act (1958), as amended in 1987, provides:
Any person who in New Zealand or elsewhere commits, or aids or abets or procures the commission by another person of, a grave breach … of [the 1977 Additional Protocol I] is guilty of an indictable offence.
In its written statement submitted to the ICJ in the
Nuclear Weapons case in 1995, New Zealand stated, with reference to customary international law: “It is prohibited to use indiscriminate methods and means of warfare which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians and other non-combatants.”