Japan
Practice Relating to Rule 106. Conditions for Prisoner-of-War Status
At the CDDH, Japan abstained in the vote on draft Article 42 of the Additional Protocol I (now Article 44) because it considered that “the provisions of paragraph 3 on the ways in which members of irregular forces were required to distinguish themselves from civilians would lead to inadequate protection of the civilian population”.
Japan further stated that paragraph 3 should be construed “as applying restrictively to exceptional cases” and that the term “military deployment” used in paragraph 3(b) meant “any movement towards a place from which an attack was to be launched”.