Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907

Peace Palace During the Second Peace Conference in 1907, the foundation stone of the Peace Palace was laid. The building was not only intended to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration, it was also supposed to house the largest library in the field of international law and peace. In the presence of the Dutch Royal Family, financier Andrew Carnegie and an international group of jurists, politicians and pacifists, the key to the Peace Palace was handed over on 28 August 1913.

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 are a series of international treaties and declarations negotiated at three international peace conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law. A third conference was planned for 1914 and later rescheduled for 1915, but it did not take place because of the start of World War I.^[1]