Geneva Protocol

Geneva Protocol: see protocol.

---

Geneva Protocol

 officially Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes

(1924) League of Nations draft treaty to ensure collective security in Europe. Submitted by Edvard Beneš, the protocol proposed sanctions against an aggressor nation and provided a mechanism for the peaceful settlement of disputes. States would agree to submit all disputes to the Permanent Court of International Justice, and any state refusing arbitration was to be deemed the aggressor. The French enthusiastically supported the protocol, but it failed after it was rejected by the British.

---

Geneva Protocol 

(1925; full name, Geneva Protocol on the Prohibition in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Such Gases and of Bacteriological Weapons), the principal international agreement concerning the prohibition of chemical and bacteriological warfare. The parties to the Geneva Protocol confirmed their recognition of the ban on the use of chemical weapons and agreed to extend this ban to bacteriological weapons. As of Jan. 1, 1972, the Geneva Protocol had been signed and ratified by 29 states, and 36 states had signed the protocol or acceded to it without ratifying it.

The USSR ratified the Geneva Protocol in 1928, making two reservations in signing it: first, the protocol would obli-gate the USSR government only with respect to states that have signed and ratified or definitively acceded to the protocol; second, the government of the USSR would cease to observe the protocol with respect to any enemy state whose armed forces or whose formal or de facto allies disregarded the prohibitory substance of the protocol. The term of the Geneva Protocol is unlimited, and the signatories have committed themselves to exert every effort to induce other coun-tries to accede to the protocol.