ICRC's Updated Geneva IV Commentary Misses on Disability

By Priya Raman

Twenty years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006, the ICRC's updated Commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention engages substantively with disability protection — but close analysis shows significant omissions that practitioners should not overlook.

The International Committee of the Red Cross released its 2025 Commentary on GC IV aiming to "reflect developments in how the law is applied and interpreted in practice." The organization justifiably highlighted its disability coverage as an achievement. It is a considerable advance on the 1958 Pictet Commentary, which predates any UN consideration of disability. Yet the promised coverage is uneven.

What does the treaty language actually say?

Disability terminology across the Geneva Conventions, their Additional Protocols and related instruments serves three distinct functions — and only the third concerns disability as the CRPD understands it.

• Incapacitation. "Disabled" denotes a combatant hors de combat. The Lieber Code (1863, Art. 71) prohibits injuring an enemy who "is disabled"; the St. Petersburg Declaration (1868) speaks of "disabled men." AP I, Art. 41 protects from attack persons incapacitated by wounds or sickness.
• Measure of harm. Weapons may not cause unnecessary suffering; the inevitability of permanent disability indicates superfluous injury, as in Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons.
• Specific protection. Terms include "the disabled," "the blind," "infirm," "mental disease."

The social model of disability exposes a risk in the second framing: unnecessary suffering becomes too easily conflated with living with a disability. The wrong lies in deliberate, militarily needless infliction of permanent impairment — not in the alleged tragedy of the life that follows.

GC III, Art. 30 illustrates the problem. Its second paragraph mandates special facilities for "the disabled, in particular … the blind." Its first contemplates isolation wards for "contagious or mental disease," pairing psychosocial disability with contagion. That pairing is plainly at odds with the prohibition against adverse distinction.

Weapons treaties add "victim." The Mine Ban Treaty (Art. 6(3)) introduced victim assistance into a weapons ban treaty for the first time. The Convention on Cluster Munitions (Art. 5) and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Art. 6) go further, obliging assistance in accordance with human rights law.

AP I, Art. 8(a) defines "wounded" and "sick" as persons who, because of "trauma, disease or other physical or mental disorder or disability," need medical care — extending to "the infirm," nowhere defined. Protection turns on medical need. That excludes persons with disabilities who require no care, tying disability to the discredited biomedical paradigm.

Where does the 2025 Commentary fall short?

Article 37 (humane treatment). The Commentary on detained protected persons makes no mention of disability, even in footnotes. The ICRC's own fact sheet recognizes detained persons with disabilities "can face numerous challenges in obtaining appropriate care." Human rights jurisprudence — Chinchilla Sandoval v. Guatemala and Ximenes Lopes v. Brazil (Inter-American Court), Jasinskis v. Latvia and Helhal v. France (ECtHR) — establishes that failure to adapt detention conditions can amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, even absent intent to humiliate. The Commentary should have drawn on it.

Article 27 (state of health). No mention of disability, despite acknowledging "other types of differentiation may be necessary if the circumstances of a protected person so require" (para. 2315) — without identifying disability as such a circumstance.

Article 14 (hospital and safety zones). The Commentary brings disability under "infirm" without explaining why persons with disabilities may need refuge, as it does for women and children. It cites Security Council Resolution 1325 on women but omits Resolution 2475 (2019) on persons with disabilities.

The gaps are not trivial. Even the Oxford University Press Commentary on the Geneva Conventions overlooks that the prohibition of adverse distinction applies to persons with disabilities (p. 196).

The CRPD Committee's just-released General Comments No. 9 and No. 10 on Article 11 — requiring States to protect persons with disabilities in situations of risk — address these linkages directly. The forthcoming AP I Commentary offers the opportunity to do so comprehensively.

Takeaway: The 2025 Commentary advances disability protection but leaves practitioners without guidance on reasonable accommodation in detention, on disability as distinct from ill health, and on Resolution 2475's relevance.