Revisiting the law of occupation.

Occupation being a type of international armed conflict, the main rules regulating it are to found in the laws of war. The IHL treaty-based legal framework of occupation dates from the beginning of the 20th century and is based on three main tenets: (1) the obligation to maintain the status quo ante, or in other words the obligation to maintain the occupied territory as much as possible in the same state as it was before the occupation; (2) the provisional character of occupation; and (3) the fact that is does not transfer title. The contemporary situations of occupation however seem to be challenging this legal framework in its core. First of all, whereas occupation had been originally foreseen as being a short-term situation, and consequently regulated as such, the occupation by Israel of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) has been going on for decades. Secondly, these basic tenets are also challenged by what has been commonly referred to as “transformative” occupation. Such occupations, "whose main objective is to overhaul the institutional and political structure of the occupied territory", are easily understood to be difficult to square with the obligation to maintain the status quo ante. The main question of this research is whether the law of occupation is still suited to address the contemporary situations of occupation. We will demonstrate that the law is still suited and this for three reasons. Firstly, the existing IHL rules regulating occupation can, to a certain extent, be applied flexibly. Secondly, International Human Rights law can play a role in filling the gaps left by the law of occupation. Thirdly, the UN Security Council can to a certain extent modulate the law of occupation in order to make it more suited to certain situations.status: publishe