Conventional weapons and international humanitarian law
International humanitarian law (IHL) bans or restricts certain types of conventional weapons in order to protect civilians from their indiscriminate effects and to spare combatants from excessive injuries that serve no military purpose. One of the main legal instruments for this is the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
The 1980 Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects (known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, or CCW) is based on the general rules of IHL that prohibit the use of weapons that are indiscriminate or of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.
