In this session, the IHL Centre presented two practical tools designed to support protection actors in strengthening IHL-based analysis and advocacy: Stockholm Manual: A Practitioner’s Guide to Conducting IHL Assessments and Advocacy and the report Inclusive IHL: Closing the Gaps in Humanitarian Protection.
Across humanitarian contexts, protection actors are navigating increasingly complex environments where IHL violations are drivers of civilian harm. This session focuses on how to better translate field observations into clear legal analysis and actionable advocacy—core to protection outcomes and engagement with duty bearers.
The Stockholm Manual offers a practical, accessible tool—no legal background required—to:
- Understand the relevant provisions of IHL and apply them to their context;
- Assess whether parties to conflict are likely to be failing to carry out their legal obligations;
- Incorporate IHL-based analysis into advocacy, reporting, and humanitarian action to influence the behaviour of armed actors and reduce harm to civilians.
The Inclusive IHL report complements this by addressing a key gap in protection practice: the need to account for diversity within affected populations. It highlights how overlooking factors such as gender, age, disability, and displacement status can lead to advocacy and protection gaps, and provides a framework for more inclusive, context-sensitive analysis.
In this session, the IHL Centre shared a number of valuable resources including information on their free IHL advisory service and contact information: [email protected]. The IHL Centre have the capacity to respond in English, French and Arabic but can make accommodations for other languages.
These tools are designed to support protection partners in delivering more consistent, inclusive, and legally grounded protection responses, and to strengthen collective efforts to influence behaviour and reduce civilian harm. They also complement the GPC’s Protection Advocacy Toolkit which offers further insights and tools for driving effective and collaborative advocacy to address protection risks.
