Problematizing the Competence of International Human Rights Mechanisms over International Humanitarian Law

This paper problematizes the ‘competence’ of international human rights law (“IHRL”) mechanisms, including both treaty bodies and mechanisms established by the UN, over international humanitarian law (“IHL”). It examines three building blocks that enable the work of IHRL mechanisms on situations of armed conflicts: the mandates they hold (institutional competence), the norms they draw on (normative competence) and the expertise they possess (technical competence), which will form the three substantive sections of this paper. The first section will scrutinise the limits to the institutional competence of IHRL mechanisms based on their mandate and demonstrate how certain mechanisms have exceeded these limits in their engagement with IHL. The second section will uncover the tendency of certain mechanisms with institutional competence over IHL to focus primarily on IHL in their work on situations of armed conflicts, thereby implicitly renouncing their normative competence over IHRL, and this despite the ample resource within IHRL itself that address issues in armed conflicts in its own distinct way. The third section will critique both the suggestion that IHRL mechanisms lack technical competence in IHL and the call for more IHL expertise in these mechanisms.