Human Shield

A human shield is a non-combatant, or group of non-combatants, who either volunteers or is forced to protect a target from attack by their presence, on the expectation that an attacker will be deterred from striking a location where civilians are present. Involuntary human shielding has occurred frequently in conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while voluntary human shields have also been used as a tool of nonviolent resistance, notably by Mahatma Gandhi. Compelling protected persons to serve as human shields violates the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 Additional Protocol I, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; under Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, using civilians to render military objectives immune from attack is prohibited and may constitute a war crime under international humanitarian law binding on all parties to a conflict. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/