Introduction

The latter part of Hilaire McCoubrey's career as a leading academic in the field of international humanitarian law (IHL) coincided with the period when the British Army gradually came to recognize IHL as a subject to be taken seriously when planning and conducting military operations. Through his publications, the courses he arranged for military lawyers at Nottingham and Hull, and latterly as Chairman of the UK Group of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War, Hilaire played an important role in this development. The purpose of this contribution, written from the perspective of a military lawyer, is to outline the increasing involvement of legal officers in the British Army in military operations over the last half century. Save to the extent that British military lawyers were actively involved between 1945–9 in investigating the conduct of German and Japanese operations during the Second World War and in prosecuting German and Japanese war criminals before British military tribunals, for much of this time IHL was regarded as a matter of purely academic interest. Today, it is an integral aspect of operational planning. The extent of the transformation was brought home to the author in 1999, when a young Army Legal Services (ALS) officer gave him an account of a British general's initial planning meeting on arrival at his HQ in the Balkans in the late 1990s.