Maritime operational law applicable to international armed conflicts at sea, a brief approach from its sources and main references

Abstract

Maritime operational law is a topic that has not been explored enough by the Spanish Language Academy; in this sense, this article attempts an approach to this singular law at an introductory level. To that end, we initially need to know what responsibilities are assigned to the Navies, when their Naval Forces (NNFF), fulfill the purposes assigned to them by their Constitution and internal regulations, in addition to public international law, international humanitarian law, law of the sea and other international corpus iuris. The NNFF basically fulfills two purposes: first, they carry out military operations during international armed conflicts or non-international armed conflicts, using rules of engagement in application of international humanitarian law, confronting one or more enemy States or organized armed groups - in the Peruvian norm these are called hostile groups - and, second, when they act carrying out surveillance operations at sea aimed at enforcing the law, preventing the commission of criminal offenses such as piracy, terrorism, illicit drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, arms trafficking, operations against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, environmental pollution, among others; within the scope of their responsibility, and also fighting against transnational organized crime organizations, applying the use of force regulatory framework of international human rights law. Also, perform maritime search and rescue.
The action of the NNFF in the above areas is made possible through maritime operational law; at this time we will only develop aspects related to part of the first purpose mentioned above, that is, the participation of the NNFF as combatants during international armed conflicts, understood as declared war or any other armed confrontation between two or more States, even if one of them has not recognized the state of war as defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross 11 , with the commitment to write later on the issues that this time remain pending.