Activities of mixed medical commissions and conducting military medical examination: organizational and legal basics of interaction

Abstract

Background. The issues of providing timely and high-quality medical care to participants in armed conflicts, their medical examination and certification to determine the presence (absence) of diseases (conditions) is a task imposed by international humanitarian law on all parties to such a conflict. For these purposes, Article 112 of the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War prescribes the creation and functioning of mixed medical commissions that could solve the problems of assessing the health of prisoners of war. This Convention also approved the provision on mixed medical commissions. At the same time, as the experience of modern armed conflicts shows, as a rule, the creation and functioning of mixed medical commissions is more a pious wish than a norm used by the parties to an armed conflict. In order to resolve the issues of timely and complete medical examination of prisoners of war, it is necessary not only to have established international legal regulation, but also new approaches that will ensure the right to health protection, medical care and repatriation for health reasons, as well as to receive other social guarantees and compensation for the wounded and sick who were in captivity.

Purpose. The aim of the work is to reveal the foundations and features of the activities of mixed medical commissions formed during an armed conflict and that their individual functions in the future can be performed by military medical commissions, as bodies that carry out military medical examinations.

Materials and methods. Disclosure of the necessary theoretical and empirical material on the research problem, resolution of the contradictions identified by the author, achievement of the goal and solution of the research tasks required the use of the corresponding methodology, which is justified within the framework of modern scientific rationality. Such methodology includes systemic, comparative legal and complex approaches, as well as functional, dialectical, deductive, formal legal and dogmatic analyses, methods of generalization of scientific information, its synthesis, classification, identification and evaluation.

Results. The work managed to generalize the legal, organizational and functional bases of the activities of mixed medical commissions created for the period of armed (military) conflict. It is substantiated that in modern conditions, when contradictions and disagreements between the states participating in the armed conflict do not allow them to reach an agreement on the creation of mixed medical commissions and the organization of their activities, an adequate alternative to this seems to be the assignment of some of their functions to military medical commissions. This can be done due to the fact that military medical commissions that carry out military medical examination, establish a causal relationship, act legislatively and functionally independently of the military-administrative leadership. Such an approach is one of the ways to resolve the contradiction between the need of the international community for a humane attitude to prisoners of war, providing them with the necessary medical care, realizing the right to a medical examination and the objective impossibility of creating mixed medical commissions in the conditions of a modern military (armed) conflict.