reprisal
Sign in to saveA reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. Since the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (AP 1), reprisals in the laws of war are extremely limited, as they commonly breach the rights of non-combatants.
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Encyclopedic overview
11 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- International law
- World War I
- 1914 Portugal-Germany dispute
- Irish War of Independence
- World War II
- Post-1945
- See also
- References
- Citations
- Sources
A reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. Since the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (AP 1), reprisals in the laws of war are extremely limited, as they commonly breach the rights of non-combatants.
==Etymology== The word came from French, where it originally meant "act of taking back", for example, raiding back the equivalent of cattle lost to an enemy raid.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “reprisal” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.