Legal Status
Modern hospital ships display large Red Crosses or Red Crescents to signify their Geneva convention protection under the laws of war. Even so, marked vessels have not been completely free from attack. During both WW I and WW II (see Lists of hospital ships sunk in either war), noncombatant markings did not stop the sinking of a number of hospital ships by either side. In one peculiar case, a British air attack in 1945 sank the German ship SS Deutschland with substantial loss of life. In the war's closing days, this ship may have been in the process of conversion to a hospital ship. If so, it apparently had not been sufficiently marked as a hospital ship, perhaps owing to the chaos surrounding the collapse of military and civilian authority in Nazi Germany.
Some hospital ships, such as the SS Hope, belong to civilian agencies, and as such are not part of any navy.
The British Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship RFA Argus would be a hospital ship were it not for its armaments. When performing its medical role it is designated a 'primary casualty receiving ship'.
Armed vessels are disqualified from protection as a hospital ship under international law.
Read more about this topic: Hospital Ship
Famous quotes containing the words legal status, legal and/or status:
“In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends—an attainment conditioned in this way by universality—there is formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all. On this system, individual happiness, etc. depend, and only in this connected system are they actualized and secured.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“What is clear is that Christianity directed increased attention to childhood. For the first time in history it seemed important to decide what the moral status of children was. In the midst of this sometimes excessive concern, a new sympathy for children was promoted. Sometimes this meant criticizing adults. . . . So far as parents were put on the defensive in this way, the beginning of the Christian era marks a revolution in the child’s status.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)