Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict: Annual Open Debate
Tomorrow (20 May), the Security Council will hold its annual open debate on the protection of civilians (PoC) in armed conflict. China—the Council president in May—is convening the meeting. The expected briefers are Edem Wosornu, Director of the Crisis Response Division of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger.
The concept note prepared by China for the meeting reviews current challenges to the protection of civilians and underscores the need to reinvigorate respect for international humanitarian law (IHL). It notes that civilians continued to suffer alarming levels of harm in 2025, including through indiscriminate attacks and disproportionate use of force in urban and densely populated areas, the systematic damage or destruction of homes and critical infrastructure, and record levels of violence against aid workers. The note highlights two thematic threads for the discussion: the tenth anniversary of resolution 2286 of 3 May 2016 on the protection of medical care in conflict, and the protection risks posed by the military application of new and emerging technologies.
Wosornu is expected to brief member states on the Secretary-General’s latest annual report on PoC (S/2026/390), which was circulated to Council members on 7 May and covers the state of civilian protection in 2025. The UN recorded over 37,000 civilian deaths across 20 armed conflicts last year, compared to the 36,000 civilian deaths recorded across 14 armed conflicts in 2024. The report characterises this as the first decline in civilian casualties after three consecutive years of sharp increases, although it emphasises that the human toll remained severe in 2025, with approximately one recorded civilian death every 14 minutes. The report also stresses that the figures represent the minimum that the UN was able to document, rather than all civilian casualties, given limitations in access and information and challenges in verifying civilian status.
Nonetheless, the report states that the downward trend was observed in most documented contexts in 2025, with marked declines in Lebanon and Syria amid reduced hostilities. By contrast, casualties rose sharply in Sudan, where more than 11,000 civilians were killed, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where more than 3,800 were killed. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), at least 20,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, including thousands of women and children, according to local health authorities. Globally, adult men made up about 40 percent of recorded civilian casualties, while women and children made up approximately 18 percent and 20 percent, respectively. The use of explosive weapons in populated areas remained a leading cause of civilian harm, and the increasing use of drones to deploy such weapons emerged as a concerning trend.
The report documents widespread damage to civilian infrastructure and disruption of essential services. In Sudan, attacks on power plants, water stations, and dams caused prolonged outages affecting more than 75 percent of households, while in Ukraine, 429 attacks on energy infrastructure—a 32 percent increase from 2024—triggered nationwide power cuts during freezing conditions. In Gaza, more than 80 percent of all structures were damaged by year’s end. For the first time in two decades, two famines were confirmed in the same year, in Sudan and Gaza, while conflict and insecurity drove acute food insecurity for 147 million people in 19 countries and territories. Forced displacement surpassed 117.3 million people by the end of June 2025.
In her briefing, Wosornu is likely to highlight the report’s focus on the tenth anniversary of resolution 2286. Adopted in response to an alarming increase in attacks against medical personnel and facilities, the resolution demanded that all parties to the conflict comply with their obligations under international law and urged member states to develop effective measures to ensure the protection of medical care in conflict. Ten years on, however, attacks on healthcare continue to feature prominently in many conflicts. The Secretary-General’s report states that the UN recorded 1,356 conflict-related attacks on healthcare in 18 countries in 2025, resulting in 1,980 deaths and 1,175 injuries, compared to 802 incidents in 2018 when monitoring began. Sudan saw the highest number of fatalities, while the OPT recorded the largest number of injuries. The report notes that the increase in violence against healthcare since 2016 has been mostly driven by state actors, who account for more than double the number of incidents than non-state actors.
Wosornu may also address the report’s findings on humanitarian personnel, which remained “deeply concerning” in 2025. More than 332 humanitarian workers were reportedly killed globally—the third consecutive year of record fatalities—with national and locally recruited personnel accounting for most deaths. In Gaza, more than 579 aid workers were reportedly killed between October 2023 and the end of 2025, including 388 UN personnel, primarily from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—the highest toll in the UN’s history. Wosornu may further express concern about the politicisation of aid delivery, including what the report described as the “militarized food distribution scheme” in Gaza that put civilians at risk of death and injury: at least 2,615 Palestinians were reportedly killed while attempting to access humanitarian assistance between late May and early October.
Spoljaric may highlight the increase in armed conflicts worldwide and broader erosion of IHL. The ICRC counted a total of 130 ongoing conflicts last year—representing a six-fold increase since 2000—and has previously described the challenges that contemporary warfare poses to the laws governing the conduct of hostilities. In this regard, Spoljaric may caution against the growing trend of excessively permissive interpretations of IHL that undermine its object and purpose, with catastrophic consequences for civilians, and the recent unprecedented withdrawals by some states from humanitarian disarmament treaties. Among efforts to counter these trends, Spoljaric may highlight the Global Initiative to Galvanize Political Commitment to International Humanitarian Law, which the ICRC launched in September 2024 together with Brazil, China, France, Jordan, Kazakhstan, and South Africa. As at May 2026, 111 countries had joined the initiative.
Both briefers may also address the protection challenges posed by emerging technologies, which is the second expected thematic focus of tomorrow’s debate. The Secretary-General’s report observes that drone attacks in conflict settings increased by at least 4,000 percent between 2020 and 2024 and that artificial intelligence (AI) has reportedly been used to support target identification in Ukraine and the OPT, raising serious concerns about loss of human oversight, accountability, and the application of such systems in densely populated areas. The briefers may reiterate the 2023 joint appeal that Secretary-General António Guterres and Spoljaric issued for member states to adopt by 2026 a legally binding instrument governing autonomous weapons systems, and they may welcome the progress that the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) made last year in drafting elements of such an instrument. They may also describe the risks posed by the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to spread misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech; to disrupt critical civilian infrastructure; and to enable surveillance and targeting of civilians.
Many member states are likely to echo concerns about the erosion of IHL and the rising toll on civilians and call for renewed efforts to strengthen compliance and accountability. Some may emphasise the tenth anniversary of resolution 2286 and call for stronger implementation of its provisions, while others may focus on the regulation of emerging technologies, including by supporting the adoption of a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons systems. Several speakers may highlight country-specific situations of concern, including the DRC, Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine.
Council members remain broadly united in expressing commitment to the PoC agenda but are deeply divided over how to advance it in practice. Geopolitical tensions have shaped discussions of several ongoing protection crises, prompting accusations of double standards and selective engagement in members’ approach to conflicts in Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, among other contexts. Members have also differed on the appropriate framework for humanitarian assistance: Western members typically invoke the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, while China, Russia, and others have stressed state sovereignty and host-country consent. Additionally, members hold diverging positions on the scope of the PoC agenda and the extent to which it should engage with adjacent issues such as climate change and new technologies. These dynamics may influence members’ statements at tomorrow’s open debate.
