The provision of information about legal frameworks for the regulation of international conflict is central to the ICRC's commitment to "prevent suffering by promoting and strengthening humanitarian law and universal humanitarian principles", Footnote 1 which includes a role in "reminding authorities of their legal obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law".
The ICRC maintains its IHL Treaties database as one of two sources of international war law: the second is a database of customary international law. The MQLWC encompasses the documents held in a treaties database by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The term 'Laws of War', also known as the 'Law of Armed Conflict' (LOAC) and 'International Humanitarian Law' (IHL), refers to a body of international treaties and documents written in principle to regulate the use of force in international and non-international armed conflicts, although, as discussed below, the history and function of this body of law is very much contested. This paper introduces the new Macquarie Laws of War Corpus, or MQLWC.
The MQLWC contributes to the growing use of corpus linguistics in legal studies, and will be of particular relevance to scholars in the field of international war law. The paper then demonstrates some of the ways the data can be explored using the concept of 'military necessity'. This paper introduces the corpus, describes the process of assembling the data, and explains its limitations.
The corpus can also be downloaded for offline processing in other popular concordance programs, such as #Lancsbox and AntConc. The new MQLWC is hosted at the Sydney Corpus Lab (), via its CQWeb interface, which allows for searching of frequencies, concordance lines, and collocations. The corpus consists of the 110 documents of international war law stored in the International Committee of the Red Cross treaties database, starting with the 1856 Declaration Respecting Maritime Law (Paris Declaration) and ending with the most recent amendment to the Rome Statute (2019). This paper discusses the creation and use of the new Macquarie Laws of War Corpus (MQLWC).
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