Legal regulations of activities of non-state actors in armed conflict

Legal regulation of activities of non-state actors in armed conflict Petra Ochmannová Dissertation thesis - ABSTRACT The increased number of armed conflicts with various forms of participation of non- state actors has recently revealed a range of possible "gaps" in legal regulation. An array of questions has thus surfaced, concerning in particular their legal status, means of conducting armed conflicts, and, in relation to these, matters of obligatoriness of the given rules and matters of their responsibility for potential breaches of international law. All of this is related in a complex way to the matters of sufficiency of the legal framework itself, within which the non-state actors operate - that is, with the affairs related to both the international humanitarian law and the international human rights law, but subsequently also with the international criminal law. The present thesis therefore focuses on the legal analysis of the activity of non-state actors in the situation of an armed conflict. Since the prevailing type of contemporary armed conflicts are internal armed conflicts, i.e. conflicts in which there is interaction of government armed forces with non-state actors, or even mutual interaction between several groups of non- state actors, the thesis focuses on the analysis of their legal activity..