Traditionally, domestic courts have been inclined to deal with international humanitarian law (IHL) issues at arm’s length. However, progressively, particularly after World War II, issues of refugee status or war crimes prosecutions granted the opportunity to these courts to apply IHL. International courts and D. Jinks (&) School of Law, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: djinks@law.utexas.edu J. N. Maogoto School of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: Jackson.Maogoto@manchester.ac.uk S. Solomon Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: solon.solomon@kcl.ac.uk D. Jinks et al. (eds.), Applying International Humanitarian Law in Judicial and Quasi-Judicial Bodies, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-6265-008-4_1, T.M.C. ASSER PRESS and the authors 2014 1 tribunals have also addressed IHL, yet as demonstrated in a number of chapters in this volume, not always adequately.1 The national security dilemmas that the war on terror introduced left in some cases international courts unable or unwilling to engage in the dialogue that has to be developed between IHL and these national security parameters.2 In this sense, it is mostly domestic courts which have tried to apply IHL in the realms of these national security challenges.3 IHL issues such as civilian casualties or whether the warriors’ combatant status enables the former to claim protection under the human rights provisions, have been adjudicated by domestic courts4 and in certain cases the domestic courts’ utterance has caused international courts like the European Court of Human Rights to also postulate a position.5 Accordingly, IHL application has come to be perceived not just as a technical legalistic exercise, but also as part of the more general legal response to some of the harsh realities of modern warfare. It will be accordingly viewed in the realms of this volume. Thus, some of the chapters, like those penned by Roberta Arnold or Makane Mbengue and Brian McGarry, assess also the judicial response to crimes such as genocide or crimes against humanity, which do not necessarily have to occur in the realms of an armed conflict and thus do not always generate IHL violations, yet are deeply interrelated with war crimes.6 1 See for example in this volume the chapters penned by