 While human shields have been used throughout history in order to protect both military and non-military targets, it took the greater part of the 20th century for the legal category of human shielding to crystallize into its contemporary normative meaning.One cannot find explicit reference to human shields in the Hague Conventions, but Article 23 of the 1907 Convention states that ‘‘A belligerent is forbidden to compel the nationals of the hostile party to take part in the operations of war directed against their own country’’.Referring to this article, an official commission of the Belgian government blamed the German forces of using ‘‘human screens’’ during World War I.