Medical immunity, international law and just war theory

Under customary international law, the First Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol I, medical personnel are protected against intentional attack. In 1 of this paper, we survey these legal norms and situate them within the broader international humanitarian law framework. In 2, we explore the historical and philosophical basis of medical immunity, both of which have been underexplored in the academic literature. In 3, we analyse these norms as applied to an attack in Afghanistan (2015) by the United States; the United States was attempting to target a Taliban command-and-control centre but inadvertently destroyed a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital instead, killing 42 people. In 4, we consider forfeiture of medical immunity and, more sceptically, whether supreme emergency could justify infringement of non-forfeited protected status.