Humanitarian Laws and Protection of Sacred Buildings in Domestic and International Armed Conflicts

Context and Sacred buildings draw support and immunity from the community, due to their special religious status. To protect sacred buildings in armed conflict, several treaties have been concluded in recent centuries. In this paper some of the most important humanitarian law documents, which is to protect religious sites, are examined. This paper is document-based, descriptive and analytic; the literature review has been piled up by library-based methods from original text-books, domestic papers, and internal and international documents. The main signed documents relevant to the support of sacred buildings are relating to the Hague Peace Convention of 1907, the Lieber Code, and the Declaration of Brussels at the beginning of last century. Two Protocols additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 in 1977 relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I) and non-international Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), the Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Second Additional Protocol to the Treaty of 1954, including documents which support have predicted for places of worship in an international armed conflict to where into the statute of the court Intentionally directing attacks against places of worship has been considered among the war crimes. Supporting and defending the sacred buildings have a long history, while we see the entrance of this support into international documents, and formation of an international custom. The support of sacred buildings by international documents is weaker compared with its support of other buildings and places.