International Law, War and Human Rights: The Humanitarian Response against the State of Emergency

and exceptional danger, establishes an extraordinary legal regime, which reduces the level of protection of fundamental human rights 1 .The existence of an armed conflict implies a significance about the cause of the emergency on the applicable rules, as, in such cases, the application of the law on the protection of human rights in peacetime intersects with that of the corresponding rules of humanitarian law.First at all, in the doctrine, it is possible to find a specific approach that treats war as presenting the possibility of "justifying" a widespread suspension of legality.This theory rests on a set of judgments: first, the suspension of legality is almost inevitable; second, attempting to identify, in law, the circumstances under which legality can be suspended is futile; third, attempting to do so is pernicious as well, because it undermines the important values captured in the rule-of-law tradition 2 .The hypothesis of the regimes of exception occurs in relation to governments operating after the invocation of the emergency, and this term recalls the preposition stated by Carl Schmitt, that the real sovereign is the person who has the power to invoke the exception in a nation 3 .In this case, starting from the assumption that war represents an event completely distinct from other emergencies, such a distinction can be found in article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the article 27 of the Inter-American Convention, and article 2 of Convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. 4However, this distinction is not present in article 4 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights and in article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 5It is possible to find an initial discrepancy between the Regional Conventions and the UN Charter, 1