In armed conflicts, when people massively go missing, enforced disappearance is prohibited both by the ICPPED and customary international humanitarian law (IHL). While IHL is the primary regulator in armed conflicts, ICPPED complements and reinforces IHL protection from enforced disappearance including by providing more direct legal basis for the State Parties then customary nature of the matching IHL provisions which are often elusive for national practitioners. Obligation under ICPPED to introduce enforced disappearance as an autonomous and continuous domestic crime should provide potentially strong accountability mechanism given the absence of enforced disappearance from underlying offences considered war crimes and the contextual limitations of enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity and may also help break the silence about the disappeared. Limitation of the ICPPED’s definition of enforced disappearance as state-sponsored crime may be overcome in armed conflicts by the commensurate IHL prohibition which applies to non-state actors too.

This chapter continues to examine the critics’ complaint that the modern ICRC has become distracted from its previous areas of expertise through its expanded activities in “other violence,” arguably neglecting in relative terms international humanitarian law and political prisoners. This chapter addresses the organization in the context of IHL. The chapter’s original contribution, beyond the way the background information is presented, is to analyze recent ICRC activity on two IHL subjects: customary IHL; and cyber warfare. On the first, the author finds the ICRC study on customary IHL absolutely central to recent developments, which fits with other third parties who find the ICRC “authoritative” in this legal domain. On the second, cyber warfare, the author finds the ICRC active, involved, and very much au courant about emerging developments. Neither aspect of IHL has been ignored or forgotten.