In 1989, during a brutal civil war between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in southern Sudan, Operation Lifeline Sudan was established to deliver food aid from neighbouring states and so prevent the starvation of civilians. The UN entered into negotiations with the government and the SPLA/M and agreed to establish ‘corridors of tranquillity’ through which the humanitarian assistance could pass.
4.1 What are they?
Humanitarian corridors are arrangements to facilitate the movement of civilians and other persons protected by IHL, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. They are usually established in situations of active hostilities when movements are particularly dangerous.
Humanitarian corridors aim to allow the safe passage of people and humanitarian goods, including:
- Allowing civilians and the wounded and sick to leave particular areas, either autonomously or as part of evacuations organized by belligerents or humanitarian organizations.
- Allowing humanitarian organizations to reach affected populations.
- Allowing humanitarian relief items and equipment to be transported where they are needed.
Humanitarian corridors are usually a geographic route that can be employed for the purposes agreed during a specified timeframe. They may be established as a one-off opportunity for transit at a specified date and time, or at recurring dates and times.
4.2 What does the law say?
IHL does not refer to humanitarian corridors. Their establishment does not affect obligations and protections under IHL. Like many of the other arrangements discussed in this paper, humanitarian corridors are a way of giving effect to protections and measures specifically required or envisaged by IHL in areas affected by active hostilities. They enhance the protection of civilians from the effects of hostilities; they enhance the safety of evacuations; and they can be a way of giving effect to the obligation under IHL to allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of relief operations.
Whether or not a humanitarian corridor is warranted depends on the situation on the ground and the purpose of the corridor. A key consideration is whether the people who would be relying on the corridor are transiting through areas affected by hostilities, including crossing front lines.
4.2.1 Rules regulating the conduct of hostilities
Humanitarian corridors aim to enhance the security of those who will use them – usually civilians, the wounded and sick, and humanitarian actors. All these categories of people are protected by IHL, and belligerents must respect and protect them. Belligerents must not direct attacks against them, must refrain from indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, and must take constant care in the conduct of military operations to spare them. These obligations exist regardless of whether humanitarian corridors have been established.
The corridors are a way of facilitating compliance with these rules. The people using the corridors are entitled to protection and the parties establishing the corridors undertake not to conduct, in or in the vicinity of the corridors, military operations that could harm them.
The system works best if the corridors are ‘demilitarized’ – that is, if they are used exclusively by civilians and humanitarian actors so there can be no allegations that they provide a miliary advantage or are used to commit acts harmful to the enemy. Whether or not the routes may also be used by military personnel and vehicles, for example to conduct the evacuations, depends what belligerents agree when establishing the corridors. If such use is foreseen, the vehicles should not be attacked, despite being military objectives, as this would undermine the security of other actors using the corridors.
4.2.2 Evacuations
As elaborated in Chapter 3, IHL requires belligerents to evacuate wounded and sick members of states’ armed forces, and prisoners of war. Generally, such evacuations take place in territory controlled by the party conducting the evacuation, without crossing enemy lines, so humanitarian corridors are unlikely to be necessary.
However, humanitarian corridors can provide valuable safety for other evacuations, such as those of civilians from besieged areas, as they would be crossing enemy lines, as well as those from areas of active hostilities, regardless of who conducts the evacuations – belligerents, humanitarian organizations, or civilians autonomously.
4.2.3 Humanitarian relief operations
The rules of IHL regulating humanitarian relief operations envisage two successive steps. First, humanitarian organizations must obtain the consent of the state in whose territory relief operations will be conducted. Second, once consent has been obtained, all belligerents must allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of relief personnel and goods. They are entitled to adopt technical arrangements regulating such passage.
These arrangements may require relief convoys to use prescribed routes at specific times to ensure that they do not hamper and are not endangered by military operations, particularly when active hostilities are taking place. This said, restrictions on the activities and freedom of movement of humanitarian relief personnel may be imposed only in the case of imperative military necessity – for example, in the case of a military operation in a particular location – and, even then, only temporarily.
Humanitarian organizations do not favour humanitarian corridors as a general operational modality, as such arrangements significantly restrict their activities and freedom of movement well beyond what is envisaged by IHL. However, they recognize that there may be circumstances, particularly during active hostilities, when accepting the limitations inherent in humanitarian corridors may be the only safe way to reach populations in need. In such circumstances, humanitarian corridors can be a means for belligerents to meet their obligation to allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded passage of relief operations.
4.3 Operation in practice – challenges, good practice and recommendations
4.3.1 Is a humanitarian corridor necessary?
Frequently, when civilians are caught up in active fighting, or where humanitarian response is severely hampered, there are calls for the establishment of humanitarian corridors. These requests are rarely made by humanitarian organizations. They are made by other stakeholders – usually well-intentioned third states, activists, and/or the media and general public – looking for ways to alleviate the hardships they are witnessing. But they often do not realize that humanitarian corridors may in fact limit rather than facilitate a humanitarian response.
Such public calls can be unhelpful from an operational perspective, particularly in very politicized contexts. As noted, whenever possible, humanitarian actors avoid humanitarian corridors as an operational modality, as these can become the only way of offering assistance and thus lead to a more difficult and compromised operating environment for humanitarian agencies across wider areas.
Rather than calling for the establishment of specific corridors, humanitarian organizations prefer to negotiate access and security guarantees with belligerents, even in situations of active hostilities. However, the failure to establish corridors is often perceived by the general public as reflecting inhumanity and intransigence by the parties to the conflict.
Belligerents also tend to prefer more flexible and lighter deconfliction arrangements with humanitarian actors. For example, during the 2011 conflict in Libya, NATO would – rather than establish corridors – inform OCHA that there would be no military operations for a particular time along a particular route, allowing that route to be used by humanitarian organizations and civilians. Obviously, this was no guarantee that other parties to the conflict might not be conducting operations in the area in question during this time. As is the case for other arrangements, the protective value of humanitarian corridors is enhanced significantly if they are established by agreement between all belligerents.
Nonetheless, there may be situations when the establishment of humanitarian corridors is the best option for enhancing the security of humanitarian organizations and civilians. However, once established, they should not remain the sole basis for movement if the operating environment becomes safer.
4.3.2 Establishment of humanitarian corridors
There are two principal challenges to the establishment and operation of humanitarian corridors: getting belligerents to agree to establish them; and getting belligerents to respect the conditions they have agreed to.
Who should agree to the corridors?
IHL does not prescribe how humanitarian corridors should be established. To maximize their protective effect, they should be agreed by all the belligerents who can facilitate or adversely influence the safe operation of a corridor. Such belligerents include those with control of, or even a presence in, the territory through which the corridor passes, but may also extend to others, such as those carrying out air operations in the area.
In some circumstances, for example, during the hostilities in Gaza in 2023–24, corridors have been established unilaterally. While this means that the party establishing a corridor will allow civilian or humanitarian movements, and will not conduct hostilities or military operations in the area in question, there is no guarantee that its opponent will exercise the same restraint. There is also no guarantee that the opponent will not take advantage of a corridor for military purposes, or that it will allow civilians to leave. This clearly undermines their protective value.
Early in its operations in eastern Ukraine, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission experimented with unilateral corridors. It developed the ‘open phone’ method, with one side to the fighting unilaterally declaring it would hold fire for a specific period of time. The method was unsuccessful, as neither side using it trusted that the other side had received the notification, and it had no assurances that they would not be fired on. This approach was swiftly abandoned.
Reaching agreement
In most contexts, belligerents have limited direct contact. Consequently, as for other humanitarian arrangements, a third party may need to propose the establishment of corridors and to act as a neutral intermediary to assist parties to reach agreement on the terms of the corridors.
Frequently, this is a senior humanitarian official. For example, UN General Assembly resolution 46/182 (‘Strengthening of the coordination of humanitarian emergency assistance of the United Nations’) mentions ‘temporary relief corridors’ as one of the possible ways the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator can exercise their mandate to negotiate humanitarian access:
Others can play this intermediary role, including the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in a country, the Head of the OCHA country office, or other organizations, most notably the ICRC. For example, in 2022 the ICRC facilitated the dialogue between Ukraine and Russia for the evacuation of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, helping them identify the precise details that needed to be addressed, including time, location, route, and who could be evacuated.
The role of the intermediary is crucial. Trust between belligerents is rare; each is likely to suspect that the opponent will abuse humanitarian arrangements to its advantage. The intermediary contributes to overcoming this mistrust. To do so, they must be neutral, and be perceived as such by both sides. In recent conflicts, as noted elsewhere in this paper, states, and sometimes even armed groups, have taken on this role.
For example, in 2017 in the Philippines, the chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front acted as an intermediary between the government and the leader of the militant group that was besieging the city of Marawi on the island of Mindanao, to discuss ‘a peace corridor’ – a safe route that civilians could take to leave the city. Agreement was reached to establish a humanitarian corridor along a bridge to the mainland. The corridor allowed civilians to leave, and humanitarian organizations to reach critical areas in the besieged city with supplies and doctors.
Also important to success is for the negotiations to focus exclusively on the specific humanitarian arrangement in question, rather than for this to be one element in a broader ‘package’ of issues, some of which might not be humanitarian.
As is the case for other humanitarian arrangements, the smaller in scale the objective of a negotiation, the more likely it is that agreement will be reached and the modality will be implemented successfully. In turn, this can build trust for agreement on other arrangements.
Format and elements of agreements
As noted with regard to other humanitarian arrangements, there is no specific model for agreements establishing humanitarian corridors. As they must address numerous issues in detail, written agreements are preferable to oral ones. This allows all elements to be accurately recorded and transmitted to those responsible for their implementation.
Depending on the context, more informal ad hoc arrangements may also suffice. In March–April 2022, for example, as Russian troops were advancing in eastern Ukraine, ‘green corridors’ were negotiated on an informal basis between city and village councils on the one side, and Russian troop commanders on the other, to allow civilians to leave. More than 5,000 civilians managed to leave the city of Sumy thanks to these arrangements.
Any agreement should clearly stipulate the key elements of the corridor. In practice, these should include the days and times of its operation, its route, and who is entitled to use it (usually civilians, the wounded and sick, and humanitarian organizations).
There is no reason why humanitarian corridors should not be used also to allow the safe transit of commercial goods into hard-to-reach areas. Enabling access for commercial goods – including most notably basic commodities – contributes to sparing civilians from the effects of military operations and reduces the extent of humanitarian assistance required. It is for belligerents to agree who can use the corridors, and the modalities for this – including in terms of types of goods that can transit, and any searches to verify compliance with these conditions.
Agreements should also indicate what is expected of the belligerents during the operation of the corridors. They must undertake not to impede the operation by, for example, preventing civilians from leaving particular areas, and not to put those using the corridors at risk by conducting, in the vicinity of the corridors, military operations that could affect their security.
Belligerents may assume particular responsibilities, such as ensuring that the agreed routes can safely be used for travel. Reportedly, the agreement to evacuate the Azovstal steel plant required Ukrainian forces to demine roads, and Russian forces a key bridge.
Within the chain of command of each belligerent, clear instructions must be issued on the conditions of the corridor to ensure the agreed modalities are respected. Belligerents must also actively monitor compliance with such instructions during the implementation of the corridors.
While ideally a third party would be appointed to monitor the implementation of the agreement, this does not appear to have happened in practice. In its absence, effective lines of communication must exist between humanitarian actors using the corridors and all relevant belligerents, to rapidly address problems that could arise in the operation of the corridors. This is a role that could be played by the intermediary that facilitated the adoption of the agreement.
Information on the precise arrangements must be shared with the people who will be making use of the corridors. This is something that can be done by belligerents and by humanitarian organizations.
Finally, it should be borne in mind that humanitarian corridors are not static mechanisms, established and implemented by one-off negotiations. Instead, they are dynamic modalities that must be adapted and renegotiated as necessary as the situation evolves, including as territory changes hands or the location of fighting shifts.
4.4 In conclusion
While humanitarian corridors are frequently called for – though not usually by humanitarian actors – they are established quite rarely. There can be many reasons for this. Often, although the call is for humanitarian corridors, what is actually needed is better humanitarian access; humanitarian organizations seek to negotiate this directly with the belligerents. This is preferable to establishing corridors, which are limited and constraining. At other times, belligerents either do not manage to reach agreement, or take so long to do so that civilians take the risk of moving through areas of active hostilities even though corridors have not been established.
That said, every time that an evacuation is agreed, it is likely to have a prescribed route. This may be termed a corridor. In practice, therefore, a humanitarian corridor has been established, but it is an aspect of the evacuation rather than a standalone arrangement.
