Believing this Assembly’s past efforts to reduce unnecessary hardship and harm in military engagements are integral to maintaining the Assembly’s humanitarian mission;
Accepting that military occupation of civilian territory is often necessary to pacify the region following armed conflict;
Justly affirming that nations can balance effectively administering captured territory and the proper stewardship and protection of the inhabitants;
Outraged by military forces that treat occupied territory and peoples as an opportunity for plunder rather than hold the territory and its resources in trust for the territory’s inhabitants; and
Rejecting military success and profiteering as the penultimate goals of an occupation;
The World Assembly establishes the following:
- A ‘military occupation’ is the effective and provisional control and administration of a territory by a military power not sovereign to the territory that it controls.
- “Military efforts’ are those actions or goals, exclusive of administration or policing, taken by military forces to coordinate operational or strategic advantages in armed conflict.
- Member state occupying forces may:
- Create and enforce regulations to establish effective control over the occupied territory, provided they do not violate or frustrate extant World Assembly law;
- Levy reasonable, non-punitive taxes to defray the non-military costs of territory administration, except that such taxes may not fund compensation for occupying forces;
- Compel limited emergency civilian service, provided:
- All compelled workers are over the occupied territory’s age of majority;
- Occupying forces limit service to those efforts necessary to restore or improve the quality of life for civilians in the occupied territory;
- The service does not, in character or purpose, further military efforts; and
- The service accords with extant World Assembly labor law and pays a fair wage for the services rendered.
- Utilize natural and community resources to the benefit of the occupied territory, provided those resources:
- Are not appropriated for domestic use by the occupying force; and
- Do not further military efforts.
- Recruit volunteers for military service from within the occupied territory; and
- Employ captured public infrastructure, such as communication systems, roads, docks, or power grids, in occupied territories for military efforts.
- Member state occupying forces must:
- Immediately confer upon occupied civilian populations of nonmember states the same rights and protections of extant World Assembly law applicable to non-citizen inhabitants of the occupying nation;
- Establish or restore an impartial adjudicative authority to resolve civil and criminal disputes within the occupied territory;
- Establish or restore essential civilian infrastructure in a timely and effective manner;
- Restore and enforce public order and safety while respecting the laws of the occupied land, to the extent that it does not frustrate World Assembly law.
- Narrowly tailor any restriction of individual freedoms; and
- Peacefully transition territorial authority to a sovereign government at the conclusion of hostilities or at such time as a durable and stable peace is forged.
- The International Humanitarian Aid Coordination Committee will:
- Liaise with both military and civilian authorities within an occupied territory;
- Independently inspect occupying operations;
- Provide guidance, technical expertise, and aid for occupied civilian populations; and
- Report violations directly to the World Assembly Compliance Commission.
- Member states must consider any serious or systematic breach of § 5, either intentionally, through gross negligence, or nonfeasance, a war crime and prosecute violators accordingly.
- Member states need not treat isolated and de minimis violations as war crimes, provided they are reasonably redressed and do not continue.
